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The Wisdom of 
Robert Louis Stevenson 






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The Wisdom 

of 

Robert Louis Stevenson 



COLLECTED AND ARRANGED 
FROM HIS WRITINGS 



NEW 


YORK 


Scott-Thaw Co. 


, 542 Fifth Ave. 


MCMIV 



Copyright 1904 by Scott-Thaw Co. 



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r/re Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. 



Editor's Note, xv 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 

Himself, xvii 
Life and Death 

Liv^e To-day the Day's Life, i 
Preserve the QuaHty of Youth, 2 
Truth of Intercourse, 2 
Between Friends, 3 
Betw^een Parent and Child, 3 
Between Lovers, 3 
Between Man and Wife, 4 
Deceit, 5 

Falling in Love, 6-8 
Love Brings with it the Flighest 



A Portrait of 



of 



the Pleasure of Living, 



The Happy Lover is the Condescending 

Gentleman, 9 
Sweethearts, 10 

Love's Essence is Kindness, 10-12 
Death, 13, 14 
Our Lives are Bound Tenderly to Life 

through Friendship, 14-16 
Honesty in Business, 16 
Busyness, a Symptom of Deficient Vitality, 

16-19 



Contents 



Contents 



Life and Death — Continued 

Our Healthy Indifference to Death, 19-21 
The Last Thing a Brave Man Thinks of 

is Death, 21-23 
To be Over-wise is to Ossify, 23 
Prudence is Death to Generosity, 24 
The True Lover of Living, 24-26 
Better to Lose Health Hke a Spendthrift 

than Waste it like a Miser, 26-27 
Attempt the Leap even though Death 

Catch you in Mid-air, 27-28 
The Young Man and Death, 28-30 
Fame, 30, 31 

Great Deeds Breed their Kind, 31-33 
Business and Pleasure, 33 
How to Think of Death, 1,^, 34 
Instability of Friendship, 34, t^^ 
General Occupation, 35 
Declarations of Love, 35, 36 
The Ideal Proposal is not Expressed in 

Words, 36, 37 
Love is not Blind, 37 
A Friend is He who Knows you are No 

Good, and is Willing to Forget It, 37 
Marry in Faith and not in Hope, 38 



Life and Death — Continued 

He who Refrains from Marriage is a 

Coward, 38 
Hope and Faith, 38, 39 
The Wife, 39, 40 
Choice in Marriage, 40, 41 
The *'High Passion" is not often the Cause 

of Marriage, 42 
The Modern Marriage Idyll is often Writ 

in Common Prose, 42-44 
The Lion of Love is hardly a fit Animal 

for the Domestic Pet, 44 
Marriage, 45 
Marriage — its Advantages, 45 

its Speculative Character, 46,47 
its Beneficent Effects, 49 
its Commonplaceness, 49, 50 
to Women it is Enlarging, 50, 5 1 
its Experience Chastening, 51 
Our Presumption in Marry- 
ing, 47> 48 
A Wife is the Witness of your Life and 
the Sharpest Critic of your Conduct 
and Character. She is the Domestic 
Recording Angel, 52, 53 



Contents 



Life and Death — Continued 
Respectability, 53 
Our Boyhood, 54 
Poverty and Morality, 54, 55 
Letter from Home, 55, 56 
The Dreams by the Fireside, 56 
Happiness is Found in Social Life, 56, 57 
We Value what we Pay for, 57 
The Blind Bow-boy, 57, 58 
The Price we Pay for what we Want is 

what we Call Life — we Pay the Price 

of Money in Liberty, 58, 59 
Satisfy the Opportunities you Have before 

Looking for New Opportunities, 59 
"Making Believe" in Child's Play, 60-65 
Realism in Children, 65-67 
Apology for Idleness, 67-69 
Invalidism, Premature Old Age, 69-72 
The Invalid and His Joys, 72-75 
The Pleasures of Convalescence, 75-77 
Railway Travel, 77-79 
Ever Walk in Hope even though there be 

no Goal to Reach, 79 
The True Love Story begins with Marriage, 

Courtship is the Prologue, 80 



Life and Death — Continued 
Lies and Lying, 8i, 82 
Silence — a Method of Lying, 82, 83 
The True Veracity is Truth in the Spirit, 

not Truth to the Letter, 83 
Talk, 84-86 
Natural Talk a Festival of Ostentation, 

86-92 
The Mother and Child Must Part, 93 
Silence in Speech, 94, 95 
Courage in Life, 95 
The Value of Time, 95 
Rest after Death, 96 
Telling the Truth, 96-98 
Travel, 98 

We are all Travellers, 99 
Rest after a Tramp, 99-101 
Pleasure Trips in the Land of Thought 

and among the Hills of Vanity; 

Dwelling with Happiness, 101-104 
Bivouacs, the Halts of Life, 104-106 
A Walking Tour, 106-1 10 
The Place of Money in Life, no, in 
The Thief and the Soldier, in, 112 
Putting Questions, 112 



Contents 



Contents I^iye AND DeatH — Continued 

All Opinion Stages on the Road to Truth, 

112, 113 

Opinion is the Tavern by the Way in which 
we Dwell a little while on our Way to 
Truth, 114-116 

Woman's Self-Sufficiency, 116, 117 

Man's Dependence, 117, 118 

Representative Men and their Works, 
118, 119 

Society's Laws Affect even Dogs, 119-121 

A Wife is but a Woman; a Being of like 
Frailties as is the Man, 121-123 

Aspiration, 123-125 
Character 

Success out of Failure, 129-134 

The Selfishness of Youth, 134-136 

The Old Adam, 136, 137 

Indiscretions of Youth, 137, 138 

It Requires Brains to make a Fool of Your- 
self, 138 

Be not too Wise in your own Esteem, 139 

Lack of Prudence in Great Men, 139-141 

Hurry, 141 

Jealousy, 142, 143 



Character — Contitiued 

Modesty in Deeds, 143 

Human Endurance, 143, 144 

Individuality, 144, 145 

Tranquillity of Mind, 145 

Good Traits in Character, 145 

Gratitude, 146 

The Self-made Man, 146 

Saying *'No" and "Yes," 146 
Religion 

The Sabbath, 149 

Change of Creed, 149, 150 

Pan's Pipes, 150-158 

Our Divine Unrest, 158, 159 

Prayer, 159 
Art 

The Actor as Artist, 163, 164 

Style, 164, 165 

Cathedrals, 166, 167 

Choice of Words in Writing, 167-169 
Literature 

Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," 173, 174 

Meredith's "The Egoist," 174, 175 

Wordsworth, 175, 176 

Plays and Romances, 176 



Contents 



Literature — Continued 
The Play, 176-178 
The Romance, 178-180 
Marcus Aurelius, 180 
The Poetry of Despair, 181, 182 
Ignorance is better than that Knowledge 

which Brings Sadness, 182, 183 
Advice to the Young Writer, 183-185 
Romance the Realization of the Ideal Laws 

of the Day-Dream, 185-187 
The Quality of Romance, 187-190 
Books are Letters to the Author's Friends, 

190 
Dumas's D'Artagnan, 190-192 
The Truth in Literature is Essential, 

192-194 
The Duties of the Writer as Story-Teller, 

194-198 
Nature 

A River, 201 

Woods and Forests, 201, 202 

Forest and Ocean, 202, 203 

Sleep in the Open Air at Night, 203-206 

The Genius of Place and Time, 206-209 

The Forest as Comforter, 209-211 



Education 

The Choice of Literature as a Profession, 

215-219 
Knowledge, 219-221 
The Wisdom of the Idler, 221, 222 
Books not Everything, 222, 223 
Idleness, 223 
Education in the School and in the Street, 

224 
Playing Truant, 224-226 
The Gift of Reading, 226-228 
Education of Boys and Girls, 228. Often 

nothing but a System of Catchwords 

and Formulae, 228, 229 
The Gift of Speech, 229-231 
The Art of Speaking Well, 231-234 
The Art of the Orator, 234, 235 
Logic, 235, 236 
Men and Women 

Grave-diggers, 239-242 

The Talk of the Aged, 242-244 

The Aged as Listeners, 244-246 

Women as Talkers and Listeners, 246- 

249 
France and England, 249, 250 



Contents 



Contents 



Men and Women — Continued 

Woman's Value as a Teacher shows most 

in Married Life, 250,251 
French Independence, 251,252 
The Aged as Teachers, 252-254 
EngHshman's Pride and Ignorance, 

254-256 



THE charm and the beauty of Ste- 
venson's writings compel our hom- 
age at all times. In this small selection 
it is hoped that neither of these qualities 
has been lost, but, on the contrary, the 
fine grace of thought and the clear in- 
sight into men and things so stand re- 
vealed that they shall appeal to the 
reader and invite him to a fuller study 
of the works of one of the greatest prose 
writers of the last century. ^ ^ 



I AM a kind of farthing dip, 
Unfriendly to the nose and eye; 
A blue-behinded ape, I skip 
Upon the trees of Paradise. 

At mankind's feet, I take my place 
In solemn, sanctimonious state, 

And have the air of saying grace 
While I defile the dinner plate. 

I am " the smiler with the knife," 
The battener upon garbage, I — 

Dear Heaven, w^ith such a rancid life. 
Were it not better far to die .? 

Yet still, about the human pale, 
I love to scamper, love to race, 

To swing by my irreverent tail 
All over the most holy place. 

And when at length, some golden day, 
The unfailing sportsman, aiming at, 
Shall bag, me — all the world shall say: 

Thank God, and there's an end of that! 

Underwoods. 



LIFE AND DEATH 



IT is customary to say that age should be 
considered, because it comes last. It seems 
just as much to the point, that youth comes 
first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if 
you go on to add that age, in a majority of 
cases, never comes at all. Disease and acci- 
dent make short work of even the most pros- 
perous persons; death costs nothing, and the 
expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable 
trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly 
snuffed out in the middle of ambitious 
schemes is tragical enough at the best; but 
when a man has been grudging himself his 
own life in the meanwhile, and saving up 
everything for the festival that was never to 
be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort 
of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. 
The victim is dead — and he has cunningly 
overreached himself; a combination of calam- 
ities none the less absurd for being grim. To 
husband a favourite claret until the batch 
turns sour is not at all an artful stroke of 
policy; and how much more with a whole 
cellar — a whole bodily existence! People 
may lay down their lives with cheerfulness 



Preserve 
the Qual- 
ity of 
Youth 



in the sure expectation of a blessed mortality; 
but that is a different affair from giving up 
youth with all its admirable pleasures, in the 
hope of a better quality of gruel in a more 
than problematic, nay, more than improbable, 
old age. We should not compliment a hungry 
man, who should refuse a whole dinner and 
reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before 
he knew whether there was to be any dessert 
or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence 
in the world, we surely have it here. We sail 
in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous 
waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous 
old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaids 
singing, and know that we shall never see dry 
land any more. Old and young, we are all on 
our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco 
among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, 
and let us have a pipe before we go! Virgini- 
bus Puerisque. Crabbed Age and Youth. 



Truth 
of Inter- 
course 



IT takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest 
and most useful passage I remember to 
have read in any modern author, "two to 
speak truth — one to speak and another to 



hear." He must be very little experienced, or 
have no great zeal for truth, who does not 
recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain 
of suspicion produces strange acoustical ef- 
fects, and makes the ear greedy to remark 
offence. Hence we find those who have once 
quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and 
are ever ready to break the truce. To speak 
truth there must be moral equality or else no 
respect; and hence between parent and child 
intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal 
fencing bout, and misapprehensions to be- 
come ingrained. And there is another side to 
this, for the parent begins with an imperfect 
notion of the child's character, formed in 
early years or during the equinoctial gales of 
youth; to this he adheres, noting only the 
facts which suit with his preconception; and 
wherever a person fancies himself unjustly 
judged, he at once and finally gives up the 
effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, 
on the other hand, and still more between 
lovers (for^_mutual understanding is love's 
essence), the truth is easily indicated by the 
one and aptly comprehended by the other. 



Between 
Man and 
Wife 



A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the 
gist of long and delicate explanations; and 
where the life is known, even yea and nay 
become luminous. In the closest of all rela- 
tions — that of a love well-founded and 
equally shared — speech is half discarded, 
like a roundabout infantile process or a cere- 
mony of formal etiquette; and the two com- 
municate directly by their presences, and 
with few looks and fewer words contrive to 
share their good and evil" and uphold each 
other's hearts in joy. For love rests upon a 
physical basis; it is a familiarity of nature's 
making and apart from voluntary choice. 
Understanding has in some sort outrun 
knowledge, for the affection perhaps began 
with the acquaintance; and as it was not made 
like other relations, so it is not, like them, to 
be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more 
than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and 
believes by a natural compulsion; and be- 
tween man and wife the language of the body 
is largely developed and grown strangely 
eloquent. The thought that prompted and 
was conveyed in a caress would only lose to 



be set down in words — ay, although Shakes- 
peare himself should be the scribe. 
Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all 
others, that we must strive and do battle for 
the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas! all 
the previous intimacy and confidence is but 
another charge against the person doubted. 
" What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I 
have been deceived so long and so completely ! '' 
Let but that thought gain entrance, and you 
plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the 
past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, 
convince the reason; alas! speciousness is but 
a proof against you. "If you can abuse me 
now, the more likely that you have abused me 
from the first.'' 

For a strong affection such moments are 
worth supporting, and they will end well; 
for your advocate is in your lover's heart and 
speaks her own language; it is not you, but 
she herself, who can defend and clear you of 
the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and 
for a less stringent union ? Indeed, is it worth 
while ? We are all incompris, only more or 
less concerned for the mischance; all trying 



wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's 
feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Some- 
times we catch an eye — this is our oppor- 
tunity in the ages — and we wag our tail with 
a poor smile, "/j that all! " All ? If you only 
knew! But how can they know } They do not 
love us; the more fools we to squander like 
on the indifferent. 

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad 
to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to 
understand others that we can get our own 
hearts understood; and in matters of human 
feeling the clement judge is the most success- 
ful pleader. Virginibus Puerisque. IV. 



Falling 
in Love 



THIS simple accident of falling in love is 
as beneficial as it is astonishing. It ar- 
rests the petrifying influence of years, dis- 
proves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, 
and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto 
the man had found it a good policy to dis- 
believe the existence of any enjoyment which 
was out of his reach; and thus he turned his 
back upon the strong, sunny parts of nature, 
and accustomed himself to look exclusively 



on what was common and dull. He accepted 
a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many 
sympathies by disuse; and if he were young 
and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent these 
advantages. He joined himself to the follow- 
ing of what, in the old mythology of love, 
was prettily called nonchaloir; and in an odd 
mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, a 
preference of selfish liberty, and a great dash 
of that fear with which honest people regard 
serious interests, kept himself back from the 
straightforward course of life, among certain 
selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, 
he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel 
affectation. His heart, which has been ticking 
accurate seconds for the last year, gives a 
bound and begins to beat high and irregu- 
larly in his breast. It seems as if he had never 
heard or felt or seen until that moment; and 
by the report of his memory, he must have 
lived his past life between sleep and waking, 
or with the preoccupied attention of a brown 
study. He is practically incommoded by the 
generosity of his feelings, smiles much when 
he is alone, and develops a habit of looking 



Love 

Brings 

with it 

the 

Highest 

Sense 

of the 

Pleasure 

of 

Living 



rather blankly upon the moon and stars. ... If 
the root of the matter be in him. and if he has 
the requisite chords to set in vibration, a 
young man may occasionally enter, with the 
key of art, into that land of Beulah which is 
upon the borders of Heaven and within sight 
of the City of Love. There let him sit awhile 
to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illu- 
sions. 

One thing that accompanies the passion in 
its first blush is certainly difficult to explain. 
It comes (I do not see how) that from having 
a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts 
of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, 
in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be 
— the lover begins to regard his happiness 
as beneficial for the rest of the world and 
highly meritorious in himself. Our race has 
never been able contentedly to suppose that 
the noise of its wars, conducted by a few 
young gentlemen in a corner of an incon- 
siderable star, does not reecho among the 
courts of Heaven with quite a formidable 
effect. In much the same taste, when people 
find a great to-do in their own breasts, they 



imagine it must have some influence in their 
neighbourhood. The presence of the two 
lovers is so enchanting to each other that it 
seems as if it must be the best thing possible 
for everybody else. They are half inclined to 
fancy it is because of them and their love that 
the sky is blue and the sun shines. And cer- 
tainly the v^eather is usually fine v^hile people 
are courting. ... In point of fact, although the 
happy man feels very kindly tov^ards others 
of his own sex, there is apt to be something 
too much of the magnijico in his demeanour. 
If people grow presuming and self-impor- 
tant over such matters as a dukedom or the 
Holy See, they will scarcely support the diz- 
ziest elevation in life without some suspicion 
of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love 
and be loved in return. Consequently, ac- 
cepted lovers are a trifle condescending in 
their address to other men. An overweening 
sense of the passion and importance of life 
hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To 
women, they feel very nobly, very purely, 
and very generously, as if they were so many 
Joan of Arcs; but this does not come out in 



Love's 
Essence 
is 

Kind- 
ness 



their behaviour; and they treat them to Gran- 
disonian airs marked with a suspicion of 
fatuity. Virginibus Puerisque. III. 

f^ ERTAINLY, whatever it may be v/ith 
^^ regard to the world at large, this idea 
of beneficent pleasure is true as between the 
sweethearts. To do good and communicate 
is the lover's grand intention. It is the happi- 
ness of the other that makes his own most 
intense gratification. It is not possible to en- 
tangle the different emotions, the pride, 
humility, pity and passion, which are ex- 
cited by a look of happy love or an unex- 
pected caress. To make one's self beautiful, 
to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do any- 
thing and all things that puff out the charac- 
ter and attributes and make them imposing 
in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify 
one's self, but to offer the most delicate hom- 
age at the same time. And it is in this latter 
intention that they are done by lovers; for 
the essence of love is kindness; and indeed 
it may be best defined as passionate kindness; 
kindness, so to speak, run mad and become 



importunate and violent\yanity in a merely 
personal sense exists no longer. The lover 
takes a perilous pleasure in privately dis- 
playing his weak points and having them, 
one after another, accepted and condoned. 
He wishes to be assured that he is loved not 
for this or that good quality, but for himself, 
or something as like himself as he can con- 
trive to set forward. For, although it may 
have been a very difficult thing to paint the 
Marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act 
of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more 
difficult piece of art before every one in this 
world who cares to set about explaining his 
own character to others. Words and acts are 
easily wrenched from their true significance; 
and they are all the language we have to 
come and go upon, A pitiful job we make of 
it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mis- 
take our meaning and take our emotions at a 
wrong valuation. And generally we rest pretty 
content with our failures; we are content to 
be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but 
when once a man is moonstruck with this 
affection of love, he makes it a point of honour 



to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have 
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of 
this importance; and his pride revolts at being 
loved in a mistake. 

He discovers a great reluctance to return on 
former periods of his life. To all that has not 
been shared with her, rights and duties, by- 
gone fortunes and dispositions, he can look 
back only by a difficult and repugnant effort 
of the will. That he should have wasted some 
years in ignorance of what alone was really 
important, that he may have entertained the 
thought of other women with any show of 
complacency, is a burthen almost too heavy 
for his self-respect. But it is the thought of 
another past that rankles in his spirit like a 
poisoned wound. That he himself made a 
fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly 
days before a certain meeting, is deplorable 
enough in all good conscience. But that She 
should have permitted herself the same liberty 
seems inconsistent with a Divine Providence. 
Virginibus Puerisque. III. 



THE changes wrought by death are in 
themselves so sharp and final, and so 
terrible and melancholy in their consequences, 
that the thing stands alone in man's expe- 
rience, and has no parallel upon earth. It out- 
does all other accidents because it is the last of 
them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its 
victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a reg- 
ular siege and creeps upon their citadel during 
a score of years. And when the business is 
done, there is sore havoc made in other peo- 
ple's lives, and a pin knocked out by which 
many subsidiary friendships hung together. 
There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and 
single beds at night. Again, in taking away 
our friends, death does not take them away 
utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, 
and soon intolerable residue, which must be 
hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter 
of sights and customs striking to the mind, 
from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets 
and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The 
poorest persons have a bit of pageant going 
towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up 
over the least memorable; and, in order to 



13 



preserve some show of respect for what re- 
mains of our old loves and friendships, we 
must accompany it with much grimly ludi- 
crous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker 
parades before the door. All this, and much 
more of the same sort, accompanied by the 
eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to 
put humanity in error; nay, in many philoso- 
phies the error has been embodied and laid 
down with every circumstance of logic; al- 
though in real life the bustle and swiftness, 
in leaving people little time to think, have not 
left them time enough to go dangerously 
wrong in practice. 

Virginihus Piierisque. Aes Triplex. 



Our 

Lives are 
Bound 
Tenderly 
to Life 
through 
Friend- 
ship 



LASTLY, he is bound tenderly to life by 
the thought of his friends; or, shall we 
not say rather, that by their thought for him, 
by their unchangeable solicitude and love, 
he remains woven into the very stuff of life, 
beyond the power of bodily dissolution to 
undo } In a thousand ways will he survive 
and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la 
Boetie survived during all the years in which 



14 



Montaigne continued to converse with him 
on the pages of the ever-dehghtful essays. 
Much of what was truly Goethe was dead 
already when he revisited places that knew 
him no more, and found no better consola- 
tion than the promise of his own verses, that 
soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when 
we think of what it is that we most seek and 
cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in 
calling ours, it v/ill sometimes seem to us as if 
our friends, at our decease, w^ould suffer loss 
more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who 
should care more for the outlying colonies he 
knows on the map, or through the report of 
his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his em- 
pire under his eyes at home, are we not more 
concerned about the shadowy life that we have 
in the hearts of others, and that portion in 
their thought and fancies which, in a certain 
far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the 
real knot of our identity — that central m.e~ 
tropolis of self, of which alone we are imme- 
diately aware — or the diligent service of 
arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity 
of ganglia, which we know (as we know a 



proposition in Euclid) to be the source and 
substance of the whole ? At the death of every 
one whom we love, some fair and honourable 
portion of our existence falls away, and we 
are dislodged from one of these dear provinces; 
and they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate 
who survive a long series of such impoverish- 
ments, till their life and influence narrow 
gradually into the meagre limit of their own 
spirits, and death, when he comes at last, 
can destroy them at one blow. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South. 



Honesty 
in Busi- 
ness 



THE salary in any business under heaven 
is not the only, nor indeed the first, 
question. That you should continue to exist 
is a matter for your own consideration; but 
that your business should be first honest, and 
second useful, are points in which honour and 
morality are concerned. Profession of Letters. 



Busy- 
ness a 
Symp- 
tom of 
Deficient 
Vitality 



EXTREME busyness, whether at school 
or college, kirk or market, is a symptom 
of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness 
implies a catholic appetite and strong sense 



of personal identity. There is a sort of dead- 
alive, hackneyed people about, who are 
scarcely conscious of living except in the exer- 
cise of some conventional occupation. Bring 
these fellows into the country, or set them 
aboard ship, and you will see how they pine 
for their desk or their study. They have no 
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over 
to random provocations; they do not take 
pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for 
its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about 
them with a stick, they will even stand still. 
It is no good speaking to such folk; they can- 
not be idle, their nature is not generous 
I enough; and they pass those hours in a sort 
J of coma which are not dedicated to furious 
moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not 
require to go to the office, when they are not 
hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole 
breathing world is a blank to them. If they 
have to wait an hour or so for a train, they 
fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. 
To see them, you would suppose there was 
nothing to look at and no one to speak with; 
you would imagine they were paralysed or 



alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard 
workers in their way, and have good eyesight 
for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. 
They have been to school and college, but all 
the time they had their eye on the medal; 
they have gone about in the world and mixed 
with clever people, but all the time they were 
thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's 
soul were not too small to begin with, they 
have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of 
all work and no play; until here they are at 
forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant 
of all material of amusement, and not one 
thought to rub against another, while they 
wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he 
might have clambered on the boxes; when he 
was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; 
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuft-box 
empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright 
upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This 
does not appear to me as being Success in 
Life. But it is not only the person himself who 
suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and 
children, his friends and relations, and down 
to the very people he sits with in a railway 



carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion 
to what a man calls his business is only to be 
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other 
things. And it is not by any means certain 
that a man's business is the most important 
thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate 
it will seem clear that many of the wisest, 
most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that 
are to be played upon the Theatre of Life 
are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass 
among the world at large as phases of idle- 
ness. For in that theatre, not only the walking 
gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and dili- 
gent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who 
look on and clap their hands from the benches, 
do really play a part and fulfil important 
offices towards the general result. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Apology for Idlers. 



THIS world itself, travelling blindly and 
swiftly in over-crowded space, among a 
million other worlds travelling blindly and 
swiftly in contrary directions, may very well 
come by a knock that would set it into ex- 



19 



plosion like a penny squib. And what, patho- 
logically looked at, is the human body, with all 
its organs, but a mere bagful of petards ? The 
least of these is as dangerous to the whole 
economy as the ship's powder-magazine to 
the ship; and with every breath we breathe, 
and every meal we eat, we are putting one or 
more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly 
as some philosophers pretend we do to the 
abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened 
as they make out we are, for the subversive 
accident that ends it all, the trumpets might 
sound by the hour and no one would follow 
them into battle — the blue-peter might fly 
at the truck, but who would climb into a 
sea-going ship ? Think (if these philosophers 
were right) with what a preparation of spirit 
we should affront the daily peril of the dinner- 
table; a deadlier spot than any battlefield in 
history, where the far greater proportion of 
our ancestors have miserably left their bones! 
What woman would ever be lured into mar- 
riage, so much more dangerous than the wild- 
est sea .? And what would it be to grow old .? 
For, after a certain distance, every step we 



take in life we find the ice growing thinner 
under our feet, and all around us and behind 
us we see our contemporaries going through. 
By the time a man gets well into the seven- 
ties, his continued existence is a mere mir- 
acle; and when he lays his old bones in bed 
for the night, there is an overwhelming prob- 
ability that he will never see the day. Do the 
old men mind it, as a matter of fact ? Why, 
no. They were never merrier; they have their 
grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they 
hear of the death of people about their own 
age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly 
warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure 
at having outlived some one else; and when a 
draught might puff them out like a guttering 
candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like 
so much glass, their old hearts keep sound 
and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling 
with laughter, through years of man's age 
compared to which the valley at Balaklava 
was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket- 
green on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned 
(if we look to the peril only) whether it was a 
much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge 



into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of 
ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into 
bed. . 

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for con- 
sideration, with what unconcern and gaiety 
mankind pricks on along the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wil- 
derness of snares, and the end of it, for those 
who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. 
And yet we go spinning through it all, like a 
party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader re- 
members one of the humorous devices of the 
deified Caligula ; how he encouraged a vast con- 
course of holiday-makers on to his bridge over 
Balae Bay; and when they were in the height 
of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian 
guards among the company, and had them 
tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature 
of the dealings of nature Vv^ith the transitory 
race of man. Only, what a checquered picnic 
we have of it, even while it lasts! and into 
v^hat great waters, not to be crossed by any 
swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us 
over in the end! 
We live the time that a match flickers; we 



pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the 
earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it 
not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the 
highest sense of human speech, incredible, 
that we should think so highly of the ginger- 
beer, and regard so little the devouring earth- 
quake ? The love of Life and the fear of Death 
are tv/o famous phrases that grow harder to 
understand the more we think about them. 
It is a well-known fact that an immense pro- 
portion of boat accidents would never happen 
if people held the sheet in their hands instead 
of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some 
martinet of a professional mariner or some 
landsman with shattered nerves, every one 
of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange 
instance of man's unconcern and brazen 
boldness in the face of death! 

Virginibus Pucrisque. Aes Triplex. 

WE do not go to cowards for tender deal- 
ing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; 
the man who has least fear for his own car- 
case, has most time to consider others. That 
eminent chemist who took his walks abroad 



23 



in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid 
milk, had all his work cut out for him in con- 
siderate dealings with his own digestion. So 
soon as prudence has begun to grow up in 
the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its 
first expression in a paralysis of generous 
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; 
he develops a fancy for parlours with a regu- 
lated temperature, and takes his morality on 
the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The 
care of one important body or soul becomes 
so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer 
world begin to come thin and faint into the 
parlour with the regulated temperature; and 
the tin shoes go equably forward over blood 
and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the 
scruple-monger ends by standing stock-still. 
Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, 
and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, 
who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly 
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very 
diff^erent acquaintance of the world, keeps all 
his pulses going true and fast, and gathers 
impetus as he runs, until, if he be running 
towards anything better than wildfire, he 



24 



may shoot up and become a constellation in 
the end. Lord look after his health, Lord have 
a care of his soul, says he; and he has the 
key of the position, and swashes through in- 
congruity and peril towards his aim. Death 
is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, 
as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate 
surprises gird him round; mimouthed friends 
and relations hold up their hands in quite a 
little elegiacal synod about his path; and what 
cares he for all this ? Being a true lover of 
living, a fellow with something pushing and 
spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any 
other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly 
warfare, push on at his best pace until he 
touch the goal. *'A peerage or Westminster 
Abbey!" cried Nelson, in his bright, boyish, 
heroic manner. These are great incentives; 
not for any of these, but for the plain satis- 
faction of living, of being about their business 
in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable 
men of every nation tread down the nettle 
danger, and pass flyingly over all the stum- 
bling-blocks of prudence. Think of the hero- 
ism of Johnson, think of that superb indif- 

25 



Better 
to Lose 
Health 
Like a 
Spend- 
thrift 
than 
Waste it 
Like a 
Miser 



ference to mortal limitation that set him upon 
his dictionary, and carried him through tri- 
umphantly to the end! Who, if he were wisely 
considerate of things at large, would ever 
embark upon any work much more consider- 
able than a half-penny post card ? Who would 
project a serial novel, after Thackeray and 
Dickens had each fallen in mid-course ? Who 
would find heart enough to begin to live, if 
he dallied with the consideration of death ? 
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quib- 
bling all this is! To forego all the issues of 
living in a parlour with a regulated temper- 
ature — as if that were not to die a hundred 
times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As 
if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, 
and without even the sad immunities of 
death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the 
patient spectators of our own pitiable change! 
The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but 
the sensations carefully held at arm's length, 
as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark 
chamber. It is better to lose health like a 
spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It 
is better to live and be done with it, than to 



die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin 
your folio; even if the doctor does not give 
you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, 
make one brave push and see v^hat can be 
accomplished in a week. It is not only in 
finished undertakings that we ought to honour 
useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man 
who means execution, which outlives the 
most untimely ending. All who have meant 
good with their whole hearts, have done good 
work, although they may die before they have 
the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat 
strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful im- 
pulse behind it in the world, and bettered 
the tradition of mankind. And even if death 
catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid- 
career, laying out vast projects, and planning 
monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, 
and their mouths full of boastful language, 
they should be at once tripped up and si- 
lenced: is there not something brave and 
spirited in such a termination .? and does not 
life go down with a better grace, foaming in 
full body over a precipice, than miserably 
straggling to an end in sandy deltas } When 



The 
Young 
Man and 
Death 



/ 



the Greeks made their fine saying that those 
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help 
believing they had this sort of death also in 
their eye. For surely, at whatever age it over- 
take the man, this is to die young. Death has 
not been suffered to take so much as an 
illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, 
a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes 
at a bound on to the other side. The noise of 
the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, 
the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, 
trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy- 
starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the 
spiritual land. 

VirgiJiibus Puerisque. Aes Triplex. 

THE interests of youth are rarely frank; his 
passions, like Noah's dove, come home to 
roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his 
own nature, that is all that he has learned to 
recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of 
life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing 
faces of his elders, fill him with contemptu- 
ous surprise; there also he seems to walk 
among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in 
— __ 



the course of years, and after much rubbing 
with his fellow-men, that he begins by ghmpses 
to see himself from without and his fellows 
from within; to know his own for one among 
the thousand undenoted countenances of 
the city street, and to divine in others the 
throb of human agony and hope. In the mean- 
time he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale 
faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloro- 
form — for there, on the most thoughtless, 
the pains of others are burned home; but he 
will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, 
the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The 
length of man's life, which is endless to the 
brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious 
thought. He cannot bear to have come for so 
little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot 
bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still 
idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little 
that he has to do. The parable of the talent 
is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in 
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful 
to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers 
seem not to suspect that they may be taken 
gravely and in evil part; that young men may 

29 



Fame 



come to think of time as of a moment, and 
with the pride of Satan wave back the in- 
adequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it 
is that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys 
and to read, with strange extremes of pity 
and derision, the memorials of the dead. 

Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits. 

/ I vHE heroes themselves say, as often as 
JL not, that fame is their object, but I do 
not think that is much to the purpose. People 
generally say what they have been taught to 
say; that was the catch-word they were given 
in youth to express the aims of their way of 
life; and men who are gaining great battles 
are not likely to take much trouble in review- 
ing their sentiments and the words in which 
they were told to express them. Almost every 
person, if you will believe himself, holds a 
quite different theory of life from the one on 
which he is patiently acting. And the fact is, 
fame may be a forethought and an after- 
thought, but it is too abstract an idea to move 
people greatly in moments of swift and mo- 
mentous decision. It is from something more 



immediate, some determination of blood to 
the head, some trick of the fancy, that the 
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. 
I am sure a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a 
canoe has exactly as much thought about 
fame as most com.manders going into battle; 
and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not 
one of those the muse delights to celebrate. 
Indeed it is difficult to see why the fellow does 
a thing so nameless and yet so formidable to 
look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. 
I suspect that is why; and I suspect it is at 
least ten per cent of why Lord Beaconsfield 
and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in 
the House of Commons, and why Burnaby 
rode to Khiva the other day, and why the 
Admirals courted war like a mistress. 
Virginibus Puerisque. The English Admirals. 

— f 4— 

Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in 
my club smoking-room, that they are a 
prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and that 
it costs them more nobility of soul to do noth- 
ing in particular than would carry on all the 
wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity. 



It may very well be so, and yet not touch the 
point in question. For what I desire is to see 
some of this nobility brought face to face with 
me in an inspiring achievement. A man may 
talk smoothly over a cigar in my club smok- 
ing-room from now to the Day of Judgment, 
without adding anything to mankind's treas- 
ury of illustrious and encouraging examples. 
It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea- 
party novel that people are abashed into 
high resolutions. It may be because their 
hearts are crass, but to stir them up properly 
they must have men entering into glory with 
some pomp and circumstance. And that is 
why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, 
so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing 
moral influence, are more valuable to Eng- 
land than any material benefit in all the books 
of political economy between Westminster 
and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine- 
glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, 
^ny more than a thousand other artists when 
they are viewed in the body, or met in private 
life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, 
is an eloquent performance; and I contend it 



32 



ought not only to enliven men of the sword 
as they go into battle, but send back merchant 
clerks with more heart and spirit to their 
bookkeeping by double entry. 
Virginibus Puerisque. The English Admirals. 
— f -}— 

THERE should be nothing so much a 
man's business as his amusements. 
Nothing but money-grubbing can be put for- 
ward to the contrary; no one but Mammon, 
the least erected spirit that fell from Heaven, 
durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying 
cant that would but represent the merchant 
and the banker as people disinterestedly toil- 
ing for mankind, and then most useful when 
they are most absorbed in their transactions; 
for the man is more important than his ser- 
vices. An Inland Voyage. 

FOR I think we may look upon our little 
private war with death somewhat in this 
light: If a man knows he will sooner or later 
be robbed upon a journey, he will have a 
bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon 
his extravagances as so much gained upon 



33 



Insta- 
bility of 
Friend- 
ships 



the thieves. And above all, where instead of 
simply spending, he makes a profitable in- 
vestment for some of his money, where it will 
be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk 
living, and above all when it is healthful, is 
just so much gained upon the wholesale fil- 
cher, death. We shall have the less in our 
pockets, the more in our stomach, when he 
cries stand and deliver. A swift stream is a 
favorite artifice of his, and one that brings 
him in a comfortable thing per annum; but 
when he and I come to settle our accounts, I 
shall w^histle in his face for these hours upon 
the upper Oise. An Inland Voyage. 

THE friendships of men are vastly agree- 
able, but they are insecure. You know 
all the time that one friend will marry and 
put you to the door; a second accept a situa- 
tion in China, and become no more to you 
than a name, a reminiscence, and an occa- 
sional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a 
third will take up with some religious crotchet 
and treat you to sour looks thenceforward. 



So, 



way 



or another, life forces men 



34 



apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships 
forever. The very flexibility and ease which 
make men's friendships so agreeable while 
they endure, make them the easier to destroy 
and forget. And a man who has a few friends, 
or one who has a dozen (if there be anyone so 
wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how 
precarious a basis his happiness reposes; and 
how by a stroke or two of fate — a death, a 
few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a 
woman's bright eyes — he may be left, in a 
month, destitute of all. 

Virginibus Puerisque. I. 

A ND perhaps there is no subject on which 
-^ ^ a man should speak so gravely as that 
industry, whatever it may be, which is the 
occupation or delight of his life; which is his 
tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be 
unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus 
of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders 
of labouring humanity. Profession of Letters. 

IV/TANY lovable people miss each other in 
■^^ ^ the world, or meet under some un- 



35 



The 
Ideal 
Proposal 
is not 
Ex- 
pressed 
in 
Words 



favourable star. There is the nice and critical 
moment of declaration to be got over. From 
timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of 
possible love cases never get so far, and at 
least another quarter do there cease and de- 
termine. A very adroit person, to be sure, 
manages to prepare the way and out w^ith his 
declaration in the nick of time. And then 
there is a fine, solid sort of man, who goes on 
from snub to snub; and if he has to declare 
forty times will continue imperturbably de- 
claring, amid the astonished consideration 
of men and angels, until he has a favorable 
answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one 
would like to marry a man who was capable 
of doing this, but not quite one who had done 
so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow 
just a little bit gross; and marriages in which 
one of the parties has been thus battered into 
consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for 
meditation. Love should run out to meet love 
with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is 
that of two people who go into love step for 
step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a 
pair of children venturing together in a dark 



36 



room. From the first moment when they see 
each other, with a pang of curiosity, through 
stage after stage of growing pleasure and em- 
barrassment, they can read the expression 
of their own trouble in each other's eyes. 
There is here no declaration properly so 
called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that 
as soon as the man knows what is in his own 
heart, he is sure of what is in the woman's. 

Virgmibus Puerisque. III. 

LOVE is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O, 
yes, believe me," as the song says, " Love 
has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more 
cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those 
we love; and because you love one, and would 
die for that love to-morrow, you have not 
forgiven, and you never will forgive, that 
friend's misconduct. If you want a person's 
faults, go to those who love him. They will 
not tell you, but they know. And here lies the 
magnanimous courage of love, that it endures 
this knowledge without change. Familiar 
Studies of Men and Books. Henry David 
Thoreau. 



37 



Marry 
in Faith 
and not 
in Hope 



He who 
Refrains 
from 
Mar- 
riage 
is a 
Coward 



Hope 

and 

Faith 



A ND yet, when all has been said, the man 
-^ ^ who should hold back from marriage is 
in the same case with him who runs away 
from battle. To avoid an occasion for our 
virtues is a worse degree of failure than to 
push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is 
lawful that we pray to God that we be not 
led into temptation; but not lav/ful to skulk 
from those that come to us. The noblest pas- 
sage in one of the noblest books of this cen- 
tury is where the old pope glories in the trial, 
nay, in the partial fall and but imperfect 
triumph, of the younger hero. [Browning's 
''The Ring and the Book."] Without some 
such manly note, it were perhaps better to 
have no conscience at all. But there is a vast 
difference between teaching flight, and show- 
ing points of peril that a man may walk the 
more warily. And the true conclusion of this 
paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, 
and embrace that shining and courageous 
virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, head- 
long, pleasant fellow, good to chase swal- 
lows with the salt; Faith is the grave, expe- 
rienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ig- 
___ _ ^ 



norance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a 
knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of cir- 
cumstance and the frailty of human resolu- 
tion. Hope looks for unqualified success; but 
Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes 
honourable defeat to be a form of victory. 
Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up 
in Christian days, and early learnt humility. 
In the one temper, a man is indignant that 
he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of 
elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a 
sense of his infirmities, he is filled with con- 
fidence because a year has come and gone, 
and he has still preserved some rags of honour. 
In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in 
the last, he knows that she is like himself — 
erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like him- 
self, also, filled v/ith a struggling radiancy of 
better things, and adorned with ineffective 
qualities. You may safely go to school with 
hope; but ere you marry should have learned 
the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are 
stuffed with sawdiist, and yet are excellent 
playthings; that hope and/love a^ress them- 
selves to a perfection never realised, and yet. 



firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; 
that you yourself are compacted of infirm- 
ities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, 
and yet you have a something in you lovable 
and worth preserving; and that while the 
mass of mankind lies under this scurvy con- 
demnation, you will scarce find one but, by 
some generous reading, will become to you a 
lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through 
life. So thinking, you will constantly support 
your own unworthiness, and easily forgive 
the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be 
wisely glad that you retain the sense of blem- 
ishes; for the faults of married people con- 
tinually spur up each of them, hour by hour, 
to do better and to meet and love upon a 
higher ground. And ever, between the fail- 
ures, there will come glimpses of kind vir- 
tues to encourage and console. 

Virginibus Puerisque. II. 



Choice 
in Mar- 
riage 



T AM often filled with wonder that so many 
^ marriages are passably successful, and so 
few come to open failure, the more so as I 
fail to understand the principle on which 



people regulate their choice. I see women 
marrying indiscriminately with staring bur- 
gesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed bugs, and 
men dwelling in contentment with noisy scul- 
lions, or taking into their lives acidulous ves- 
tals. It is a common answer to say the good 
people marry because they fall in love; and 
of course you may use or misuse a word as 
much as you please, if you have the world 
along with you. But love is at least a some- 
what hyperbolical expression for such luke- 
warm preference. It is not here, anyway, that 
Love employs his golden shafts; he cannot be 
said, with any fitness of language, to reign 
here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, 
it is plain the poets have been fooling with 
mankind since the foundation of the world. 
And you have only to look these happy 
couples in the face, to see they have never 
been in love, or in hate, or in any other high 
passion, all their days. When you see a dish 
of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your 
affections upon one particular peach or nec- 
tarine, watch it with some anxiety as it comes 
round the table, and feel quite a sensible dis- 



The 
"High 
Pas- 
sion" is 
not often 
the 
Cause 
of Mar- 
riage 



The 
Modern 
Mar- 
riage 
Idyll 
is often 
Writ in 
Common 
Prose 



appointment when it is taken by someone 
else. I have used the phrase ''high passion." 
Well, I should say this was about as high a 
passion as generally leads to marriage. One 
husband hears after marriage that some poor 
fellow is dying of his wife's love. *'What a 
pity!" he exclaims; ''you know I could so 
easily have got another!" And yet that is a 
very happy union. Or again: A young man 
was telling me the sweet story of his love. "I 
like it well enough as long as her sisters are 
there," said this amorous swain; "but I don't 
know what to do when we're alone." Once 
more: A married lady was debating the sub- 
ject with another lady. '*You know, dear," 
said the first, "after ten years of marriage, if 
he is nothing else, your husband is always an 
old friend." "I have many old friends," re- 
turned the other, "but I prefer them to be 
nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might pre- 
fer that also!" There is a common note in 
these three illustrations of the modern idyll; 
and it must be owned the god goes among us 
with a limping gait and blear eyes. You won- 
der whether it was so always; whether desire 



was always equally dull and spiritless, and 
possession equally cold. I cannot help fancy- 
ing most people make, ere they marry, some 
such table of recommendations as Hannah 
Goodwin wrote to her brother William anent 
her friend Miss Gray. It is so charmingly 
comical, and so put to the occasion, that I 
must quote a few phrases. **The young lady 
is in every sense formed to make one of your 
disposition happy. She has a pleasing voice, 
with which she accompanies her musical in- 
strument with judgment. She has an easy 
politeness in her manners, neither free nor 
reserved. She is a good housekeeper and a 
good economist, and yet of a generous dis- 
position. As to her internal accomplishments, 
I have reason to speak still more highly of 
them; good sense without vanity, a penetrat- 
ing judgment without a disposition to satire, 
with about as much religion as my William 
likes, struck me with a wish that she was my 
William's wife." That is about the tune: 
Pleasing voice, moderate good looks, unim- 
peachable internal accomplishments, after 
the style of the copy-book, with about as 

43 



The 
Lion of 
Love is 
Hardly 
a Fit 
Animal 
for the 
Domes- 
tic Pet 



much religion as my William likes; and then, 
with all speed, to church. To deal plainly, if 
they only married when they fell in love, most 
people would die unwed; and among the 
others there would be not a few tumultuous 
households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, 
but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. 
In the same way, I suspect love is rather too 
violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good 
domestic sentiment. Like other violent ex- 
citements, it throws up not only what is best, 
but what is worst and smallest, in men's char- 
acters. Just as some people are malicious in 
drink, or brawling and virulent under the 
influence of religious feeling, some are moody, 
jealous, and exacting when they are in love, 
who are honest, downright, good-hearted 
fellows enough in the every-day aflfairs and 
humours of the world. How then, seeing we 
are driven to the hypothesis that people choose 
in comparatively cold blood, how is it that 
they choose so well ? One is about tempted to 
hint that it does not much matter whom you 
marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjective 
affection, and if you have made up your mind 



44 



to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, 
you could *'pull it through" with anybody. 

Virginibus Puerisque. I. 

TJUT, alas, by planting a stake at the top 
-*^ of a flood, you can neither prevent nor 
delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus- 
pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimo- 
nious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man 
unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an 
air of paradox. For there is something in mar- 
riage so natural and inviting, that the step 
has an air of great simplicity and ease; it 
offers to bury forever many aching preoccu- 
pations; it is to afford us unfailing and fa- 
miliar company through life; it opens up 
a smiling prospect of the blest and passive 
kind of love, rather than the blessing and 
the active; it is approached not only through 
the delights of courtship, but by a pub- 
lic performance and repeated legal sig- 
natures. A man naturally thinks it will go 
hard with him if he cannot be good and for- 
tunate and happy within such august circum- 
vallations. 



45 



Its 

Specu- 
lative 
Charac- 
ter 



And yet there is probably no other act in a 
man's Hfe so hot-headed and foolhardy as 
this one of marriage. For years, let us sup- 
pose, you have been making the most in- 
different business of your career. Your ex- 
perience has not, we may dare to say, been 
more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; 
like them, you have seen and desired the good 
you have not been able to accomplish; like 
them, you have done the evil that you loathed. 
You have waked at night in a hot or cold 
sweat, according to your habit of body, re- 
membering with dismal surprise your own 
unpardonable acts and sayings. You have 
been sometimes tempted to withdraw en- 
tirely from this game of life; as a man who 
makes nothing but misses withdraws from 
that less dangerous one of billiards. You have 
fallen back upon the thought that you your- 
self most sharply smarted for your misde- 
meanors, or, in the old plaintive phrase, that 
you were nobody's enemy but your own. 
And then you have been made aware of what 
was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in 
the other part of your behaviour; and it 



46 



seemed as if nothing could reconcile the con- 
tradiction; as indeed nothing can. If you are a 
man, you have shut your mouth hard and 
said nothing; and if you are only a man in the 
making, you have recognised that yours v^as 
quite a special case, and you yourself not 
guilty of your ov^n pestiferous career. 
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us ac- 
cept these apologies; let us agree that you are 
nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree 
that you are a sort of moral cripple, impotent 
for good; and let us regard you with the un- 
mingled pity due to such a fate. But there is 
one thing to which, on these terms, we can 
never agree: we can never agree to have 
you marry. What! you have had one life to 
manage, and have failed so strangely, and 
now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin 
with it the management of some one else's ? 
Because you have been unfaithful in a very 
little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over 
ten cities. You strip yourself by such a step 
of all remaining consolations and excuses. 
You are no longer content to be your own 
enemy. You must be your wife's also. You 



have been hitherto in a mere subaltern atti- 
tude; deaUng cruel blows about you in life, 
yet only half responsible, since you came 
there by no choice or movement of your own. 
Now, it appears, you must take things on 
your own authority. God made you, but you 
marry yourself; and for all that your wife 
suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man 
must be very certain of his knowledge ere he 
undertakes to guide a ticket-of-leave man 
through a dangerous pass; you have eternally 
missed your way in life, with consequences 
that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully 
seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag 
her after you through ruin. And it is your 
wife, you observe, whom you select. She, 
whose happiness you most desire, you choose 
to be your victim. You would earnestly warn 
her from a tottering bridge or a bad invest- 
ment. If she were to marry someone else, how 
you would tremble for her fate! If she were 
only your sister, and you thought half as much 
of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her 
future to a man no better than yourself! 

Virginibus Puertsque. II. 



INSTEAD of on two or three, you stake 
your happiness on one Hfe only. But still, 
as the bargain is more explicit and complete 
on your part, it is more so on the other; and 
you have not to fear so many contingencies; 
it is not every wind that can blow you from 
your anchorage; and so long as death with- 
holds his sickle, you will always have a friend 
at home. People who share a cell in the Bas- 
tile, or are thrown together on an uninhab- 
ited isle, if they do not immediately fall to 
fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of 
compromise. They will learn each other's 
ways and humours, so as to know where they 
must go warily, and where they may lean 
their whole weight. The discretion of the first 
years becomes the settled habit of the last; 
and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives 
may grow indissolubly into one. 
But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all 
heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the 
spirit of generous men. In marriage, a man 
becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a 
fatty degeneration of his moral being. . . . The 
air of the fireside withers out all the fire wild- 



49 



To 

Women 
it is En- 
larging 



ings of the husband's heart. He is so com- 
fortable and happy that he begins to prefer 
comfort and happiness to everything else on 
earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would 
have shared his last shilling; to-day **his first 
duty is to his family," and is fulfilled in large 
measure by laying down vintages and hus- 
banding the health of an invaluable parent. 
Twenty years ago this man was equally capa- 
ble of crime or heroism; now he is fit for 
neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak 
without constraint; you will not wake him. It 
is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a 
bachelor and Marcus Aurelius maimed ill. 
For women there is less of this danger. Mar- 
riage is of so much use to a woman, opens out 
to her so much more of life, and puts her in 
the way of so much more freedom and use- 
fulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, 
she can hardly miss some benefit. It is true, 
however, that some of the merriest and most 
genuine of women are old maids; and that 
those old maids, and wives who are unhappily 
married, have often most of the true motherly 
touch. And this would seem to show, even 



50 



for women, some narrowing influence in com- 
fortable married life. But the rule is none the 
less certain: if you wish the pick of men and 
women, take a good bachelor and a good wife. 
Virginibus Puerisque. I. 

TIMES are changed with him who mar- 
ries; there are no more by-path meadows 
where you may innocently linger, but the 
road lies long and straight and dusty to the 
grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and 
even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a 
different aspect when you have a wife to sup- 
port. Suppose, after you are married, one of 
those little slips were to befall you. What 
happened last November might surely happen 
February next. They may have annoyed you 
at the time, because they were not what you 
meant; but how will they annoy you in the 
future, and how will they shake the fabric of 
your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand 
things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro 
of a life that you shrank from too particu- 
larly realising: you did not care, in those days, 
J to make a fetish of your conscience; you 

51 



A Wife 
is the 
Witness 
of your 
Life 
and the 
Sharpest 
Critic 
of your 
Conduct 
and 

Charac- 
ter. 
She is 
the 

Domes- 
tic 

Record- 
ing 
Angel 



would recognise your failures with a nod, 
and so, good-day. But the time for these re- 
serves is over. You have wilfully introduced 
a witness into your life, the scene of these de- 
feats, and can no longer close the mind's eye 
upon uncomely passages, but must stand up 
straight and put a name upon your actions. 
And your witness is not only the judge, but 
the victim of your sins; not only can she con- 
demn you to the sharpest penalties, but she 
must herself share feelingly in their endurance. 
And observe, once more, with what temerity 
you have chosen precisely her to be your spy, 
whose esteem you value highest, and whom 
you have already taught to think you better 
than you are. You may think you had a con- 
science, and believed in God; but what is a 
conscience to a wife ? Wise men of yore erected 
statues of their deities, and consciously per- 
formed their part in life before those marble 
eyes. A god watched them at the board, and 
stood by the bedside in the morning when 
they woke; and all about their ancient cities, 
where they bought or sold, or where they 
piped and wrestled, there would stand some 



52 



symbol of the things that are outside of man. 
These were lessons, delivered in the quiet 
dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, 
but gently. It is the same lesson, if you will — 
but how harrowingly taught! — when the 
woman you respect shall weep from your un- 
kindness or blush with shame at your mis- 
conduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted 
Madonnas to the wall; you cannot set aside 
your wife. To marry is to domesticate the 
Recording Angel. Once you are married, 
there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, 
but to be good. Virginibus Puerisque. II. 

RESPECTABILITY is a very good thing 
in its way, but it does not rise superior 
to all considerations; I would not for a mo- 
ment venture to hint that it was a matter of 
taste; but I think I will go as far as this; that if 
a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfort- 
able, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, 
although it were as respectable as the Church 
of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the 
better for himself, and all concerned. 

An Inland Voyage. 

53 



Our Boy- 
hood 



OUR boyhood ceased — well, when ? — 
not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps al- 
together at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and 
possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the 
thick of that arcadian period. For as the race 
of man, after centuries of civilisation, still 
keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, 
so man, the individual, is not altogether quit 
of youth, when he is already old and hon- 
oured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We 
advance in years somewhat in the manner of 
an invading army in a barren land; the age 
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we 
but hold with an outpost, and still keep open 
our communications with the extreme rear 
and first beginnings of the march. There is 
our true base; that is not the only beginning, 
but the perennial spring of our faculties; and 
grandfather William can retire upon occa- 
sion into the green enchanted forest of his 
boyhood. Virginibus Puerisque. II. 



Poverty 
and Mo- 
rality 



IT is all very fine to talk about tramps and 
morality. Six hours of police surveillance 
(such as I have had), or one brutal rejection 



54 



from an inn door, change your views upon 
the subject like a course of lectures. As long 
as you keep in the upper regions, with all the 
world bowing to you as you go, social ar- 
rangements have a very handsome air; but 
once get under the wheels, and you wish 
Society were at the devil. I will give most re- 
spectable men a fortnight of such a life, and 
then I will offer them two pence for what re- 
mains of their morality. An Inland Voyage. 

OUT of my country and myself I go." I 
wish to take a dive among new condi- 
tions for awhile, as into another element. I 
have nothing to do with my friends or affec- 
tions for the time; when I came av/ay, I left 
my heart at home in a desk, or sent it foi'ward 
with my portmanteau to await me at my des- 
tination. After my journey is over, I shall not 
fail to read your admirable letters with the 
attention they deserve. But I have paid all 
this money, look you, and paddled all these 
strokes, for no other purpose than to be 
abroad; and yet you keep me at home with 
your perpetual communications. You tug 

55 



The 

Dreams 
by the 
Fireside 



Happi- 
ness is 
Found in 
Social 
Life 



the string, and I feel that I am a tethered 
bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the 
little vexations that I came away to avoid. 
There is no discharge in the war of life, I am 
well aware; but shall there not be so much as 
a week's furlough ? An hiland Voyage. 

YOU may paddle all day long; but it is 
when you come back at nightfall, and 
look in at the familiar room, that you find 
Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; 
and the most beautiful adventures are not 
those we go to seek. An Inland Voyage. 

WE need have no respect for a state of 
artificial training. True health is to be 
able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can 
imagine, might begin the day upon a quart 
of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as 
much as Thoreau, and commemorate his 
enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man 
who must separate himself from his neigh- 
bours' habits in order to be happy, is in much 
the same case with one who requires to take 
opium for the same purpose. V/hat we want 



56 



to see is one who can breast into the world, 
do a man's work, and still preserve his first 
and pure enjoyment of existence. Familiar 
Studies of Men and Books. Henry David 
Thoreau. 



INDEED, so long as a thing is an exhibi- 
tion, and you to pay to see it, it is nearly 
certain to amuse. If we were charged so much 
a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a drum 
before the hawthorns came in flower, what a 
work should we not make about their beauty! 
But these things, like good companions, 
stupid people early cease to observe; and the 
Abstract Bagman tittups past in his spring 
gig, and is positively not aware of the flowers 
along the lane, or the scenery of the weather 
overhead. An Inland Voyage. 



THE blind bow-boy," who smiles upon 
us from the end of terraces in old Dutch 
gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among 
a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever 
he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears 
into eternity from under his falling arrows; 



57 



The 
Price we 



pay 



for 



what we 
"Want is 
what w^e 
call Life 
— we 
pay the 
Price of 
Money 
in 
Liberty 



this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has 
but time to make one gesture and give one 
passionate cry; and they are all the things of a 
moment. When the generation is gone, when 
the play is over, v^hen the thirty years' pano- 
rama has been withdrawn in tatters from the 
stage of the world, we may ask what has be- 
come of. these great, weighty, and undying 
loves, and the sweethearts who despised mor- 
tal conditions in a fine credulity; and they 
can only show us a few songs in a bygone 
taste, a few actions worth remembering, and a 
few children who have retained some happy 
stamp from the disposition of their parents. 

Ftrginibus Puerisque. III. 

THE cost of a thing," says Thoreau, "is 
the amount of what I will call life which 
is required to be exchanged for it, immediately 
or in the long run." I have been accustomed 
to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that 
the price we have to pay for money is paid 
in liberty. Between these two ways of it, at 
least, the reader will probably not fail to find 
a third definition of his own, and it follows, 
_ 



on one or other, that a man may pay too 
dearly for his livehhood, by giving, in Tho- 
reau's terms, his whole Hfe for it, or, in mine, 
bartering for it the whole of his available 
liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There 
are two questions to be considered — the 
quality of what we buy, and the price we have 
to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, 
a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a 
year livelihood ? and can you afford the one 
you want ? It is a matter of taste; it is not in 
the least degree a question of duty, though 
commonly supposed so. But there is no author- 
ity for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in 
the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast 
amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is 
also highly improbable; not many do; and 
the art of growing rich is not only quite dis- 
tinct from that of doing good, but the prac- 
tice of the one does not at all train a man for 
practising the other. ''Money might be of 
great service to me," writes Thoreau, "but 
the difficulty now is that I do not improve 
my opportunities, and therefore I am not 
prepared to have my opportunities increased." 



59 



"Mak- 
ing Be- 
lieve " in 
Child's 
Play 



It is a mere illusion that, above a certain in- 
come, the personal desires will be satisfied 
and leave a wider margin for the generous 
impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or 
anything else, except perhaps a member of 
Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two 
thousand a year. Familiar Studies of Men and 
Books. Henry David Thoreau. 

TN the child's world of dim sensation, play 
^ is all in all. ''Making believe" is the gist 
of his whole life, and he cannot so much as 
take a walk except in character. I could not 
learn my alphabet without some suitable 
mise-en-scene, and had to act a business man 
in an office before I could sit down to my 
book. Will you kindly question your memory, 
and find out how much you did, work or 
pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and 
for how much you had to cheat yourself with 
some invention .? I remember, as though it 
were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the 
dignity and self-reliance, that came with a 
pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when 
there was none to see. Children are even con- 

' 60 



tent to forego what we call the realities, and 
prefer the shadow to the substance. When 
they might be speaking intelligibly together, 
they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, 
and are quite happy because they are making 
believe to speak French. I have said already 
how even the imperious appetite of hunger 
suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose 
with the fag end of an old song. And it goes 
deeper than this: when children are together 
even a meal is felt as an interruption in the 
business of life; and they must find some 
imaginative sanction, and tell themselves 
some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to 
render entertaining, the simple processes of 
eating and drinking. What wonderful fancies 
I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon 
teacups! — from which there followed a code 
of rules and a whole world of excitement, 
until tea-drinking began to take rank as a 
game. When my cousin and I took our por- 
ridge of a morning, we had a device to en- 
liven the course of the meal. He ate his with 
sugar, and explained it to be a country con- 
tinually buried under snow. I took mine with 



milk, and explained it to be a country suffer- 
ing gradual inundation. You can imagine us 
exchanging bulletins; how here was an island 
still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet cov- 
ered with snow; what inventions were made; 
how this population lived in cabins on perches 
and travelled on stilts, and how mine was 
always in boats; how the interest grew furious, 
as the last corner of safe ground was cut off 
on all sides and grew smaller every moment; 
and how, in fine, the food was of altogether 
secondary importance, and might even have 
been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with 
these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting 
moments I ever had over a meal were in the 
case of a calf's-foot jelly. It was hardly pos- 
sible not to believe — and you may be sure, 
so far from trying, I did all I could to favour 
the illusion — that some part of it was hol- 
low, and that sooner or later my spoon would 
lay open the secret tabernacle of the golden 
rock. There, might some miniature Red 
Beard await his hour; there, might one find 
the treasures of the Forty Thieves, and be- 
wildered Cassim beating about the walls. And 



so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, 
savouring the interest. Believe me, I had 
little palate left for the jelly; and though I 
preferred the taste when I took cream with 
it, I used often to go without, because the 
cream dimmed the transparent fractures. 
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative 
with right-minded children. It is thus that 
hide-and-seek has so preeminent a sover- 
eignty, for it is the well-spring of romance, 
and the actions and the excitement to which 
it gives rise lend themselves to almost any 
sort of fable. And thus cricket, which is a 
mere matter of dexterity, palpably about noth- 
ing and for no end, often fails to satisfy in- 
fantile craving. It is a game, if you like, but 
not a game of play. You cannot tell yourself 
a story about cricket; and the activity it calls 
forth can be justified on no rational theory. 
Even football, although it admirably stimu- 
lates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, 
has presented difficulties to the mind of young 
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at 
least one little boy who was mightily exer- 
cised about the presence of the ball, and had 

6^ 



to spirit himself up, whenever he came to 
play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, 
and take the missile as a sort of talisman 
bandied about in conflict between two Ara- 
bian nations. 

To think of such a frame of mind is to be- 
come disquieted about the bringing up of 
children. Surely they dwell in a mythological 
epoch, and are not the contemporaries of 
their parents. What can they think of them } 
What can they make of these bearded or pet- 
ticoated giants who look down upon their 
games .? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, 
following unknown designs apart from ra- 
tional enjoyment ? who profess the tenderest 
solicitude for children, and yet every now 
and again reach down out of their altitude and 
terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age .? 
Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but 
morally rebellious. Were there ever such un- 
thinkable deities as parents ? I would give a 
great deal to know what, in nine cases out of 
ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. A 
sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal 
attraction, at best very feeble; above all, I C 

64 



should imagine, a sense of terror for the un- 
tried residue of mankind, go to make up the 
attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor 
little heart, with such a weltering world in 
front of him, if he clings to the hand he knows! 
The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as 
it seems to children, is a thing we are all too 
ready to forget. '*0, why," I remember pas- 
sionately wondering, "why cannot we all be 
happy and devote ourselves to play.?" And 
when children do philosophise, I believe it is 
usually to very much the same purpose. 

Virginihus Puerisque. Child's Play. 



WE grown people can tell ourselves a 
story, give and t^ke strokes until the 
bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall 
and die; all the while sitting quietly by the 
fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what 
a child cannot do, at least when he can find 
anything else. He works all with lay figures 
and stage properties. When his story comes 
to the fighting, he must rise, get something 
by way of a sword, and have a set-to with a 
piece of furniture, until he is out of breath. 
_ 



When he comes to ride with the king's par- 
don, he must bestride a chair, which he will 
so hurry and belabour, and on which he will 
so furiously demean himself, that the messen- 
ger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at 
least fiery red with haste. If his romance in- 
volves an accident upon a cliff, he must clam- 
ber in person about the chest of drawers and 
fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imag- 
ination is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all 
toys, in short, are in the same category and 
answer the same end. Nothing can stagger 
a child's faith; he accepts the clumsiest sub- 
stitutes and can swallow the most staring 
incongruities. The chair he has just been be- 
sieging as a castle, (5r valiantly been cutting 
to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for 
the accommodation of a morning visitor, and 
he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by 
the hour wth a stationary coal-scuttle; in 
the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he can 
see, without sensible shock, the gardener 
soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. 
He can make abstraction of whatever does 
not fit into his fable, and he puts his eyes into 



66 



his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an 
unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although 
the ways of children cross with those of their 
elders in a hundred places daily, they never 
go in the same direction nor so much as lie 
in the same element. So may the telegraph 
wires intersect the line of the high-road, or so 
might a landscape painter and so may a bag- 
man visit the same country, and yet move in 
different worlds. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Child's Play. 

AND what, in God's name, is all this bother 
about ? For what cause do they embitter 
their own and other people's lives ? That a 
man should publish three or thirty articles a 
year, that he should finish or not finish his 
great allegorical picture, are questions of 
little interest to the world. The ranks of life 
are full; and although a thousand fall, there 
are always some to go into the breach. When 
they told Joan of Arc she should be at home 
doing women's work, she answered there 
were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even 
with your own rare gifts! When nature is 



67 



"so careless of the single life," why should 
we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our 
own is of exceptional importance ? Suppose 
Shakespeare had been knocked on the head 
some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's pre- 
serves, the world would have wagged on bet- 
ter or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the 
scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; 
and no one been any the wiser of the loss. 
There are not many works extant, if you look 
the alternative all over, which are worth the 
price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited 
means. This is a sobering reflection for the 
proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a 
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no 
great cause for personal vainglory in the 
phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable 
sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing 
it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. 
Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, 
but the services of no single individual are 
indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman 
with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see 
merchants who go and labour themselves into 
a great fortune and hence into the bankruptcy 

68 



court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little 
articles until their temper is a cross to all who 
come about them, as though Pharaoh should 
set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a 
pyramid; and fine young men who work 
themselves into a decline, and are driven off 
into a hearse with white plumes upon it. 
Would you not suppose that these persons 
had been whispered, by the Master of the 
Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous 
destiny ? and that this lukewarm bullet on 
which they play their farces was the bull's-eye 
and centre-point of all the universe ? And yet 
it is not so. The ends for which they give away 
their priceless youth, for all they know, may 
be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches 
they expect may never come, or may find 
them indifferent; and they and the world 
they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the 
mind freezes at the thought. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Apology for Idlers. 

T T is not in such numbness of spirit only that 
-■- the life of an invalid resembles a premature 
old age. Those excursions that he had prom- 



69 



ised himself to finish, prove too long or too 
arduous for his feeble body, and the barrier- 
hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white 
town that sits far out on the promontory, 
many a comely fold of wood on the mountain- 
side, beckons and allures his imagination 
day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his 
feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. 
The sense of distance grows upon him won- 
derfully; and after some feverish efforts and 
the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he 
falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his 
weakness. His narrow round becomes pleas- 
ant and familiar to him as the cell to a con- 
tented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already 
out of the mid-race of active life, he now falls 
out of the little eddy that circulates in the 
shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees 
the country people come and go about their 
every-day affairs, the foreigners stream out 
in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's 
activity is all about him, as he suns himself 
inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks 
on with a patriarchal impersonality of in- 
terest, such as a man may feel when he pic- 



70 



tures to himself the fortunes of his remote 
descendants, or the robust old age of the oak 
he has planted over-night. 
In this falling aside, in this quietude and de- 
sertion of other men, there is no inharmonious 
prelude to the last quietude and desertion of 
the grave; in this dullness of the senses there 
is a gentle preparation for the final insensibil- 
ity of death. And to him the idea of mortality 
comes in a shape less violent and harsh than 
is its v^ont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than 
as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the 
last step on a long decline of way. As we turn 
to and fro in bed, and every moment the 
movements grow feebler and smaller and 
the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep 
overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, 
so desire after desire leaves him; day by day 
his strength decreases, and the circle of his 
activity grows ever narrower; and he feels, if 
he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the 
passion of life, thus gradually inducted into 
the slumber of death, that when at last the 
end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If 
anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the 



71 



The In- 
valid and 
hisjoys 



coming of the last enemy, surely it should be 
such a mild approach as this; not to hale us 
forth with violence, but to persuade us from 
a place we have no further pleasure in. It is 
not so much, indeed, death that approaches 
as life that withdraws and withers up from 
round about him. He has outlived his own 
usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; 
and if there is to be no recovery; if never again 
will he be young and strong and passionate; 
if the actual present shall be to him always 
like a thing read in a book or remembered 
out of the faraway past; if, in fact, this be 
veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly 
for the continuance of a twilight that only 
strains and disappoints the eyes, but stead- 
fastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray 
for Medea; when she comes, let her either 
rejuvenate or slay. 

Virginihus Puerisque. Ordered South. 

FOR it is not altogether ill with the invalid, 
after all. If it is only rarely that anything 
penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, 
when anything does, it brings with it a joy 



72 



that is all the more poignant for its very 
rarity. There is something pathetic in these 
occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. 
In his lowest hours he will be stirred and 
awakened by many such; and they will 
spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a 
friend once said to me, the "spirit of delight" 
comes often on small wings. For the pleasure 
that we take in beautiful nature is essentially 
capricious. It comes sometimes when we 
least look for it; and sometimes, when we 
expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape 
joyously for days together, in the very home- 
land of the beautiful. We may have passed a 
place a thousand times and one; and on the 
thousand and second it will be transfigured, 
and stand forth in a certain splendour of 
reality from the dull circle of surroundings; 
so that we see it "with a child's first pleas- 
ure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by 
the lake side. And if this falls out capriciously 
with the healthy, how much more so with the 
invalid. Some day he will find his first violet 
and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what al- 
chemy the cold earth of the clods, and the 



73 



vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into 
colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. 
Or perhaps he may see a group of washer- 
women reheved, on a spit of shingle, against 
the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers 
in a tempered daylight of an olive-garden; 
and something significant and monumental 
in the grouping, something in the harmony 
of faint colour that is always characteristic 
of the dress of these Southern women, will 
come home to him unexpectedly, and awake 
in him that satisfaction with which we tell 
ourselves that we are the richer by one more 
beautiful experience. Or it may be something 
even slighter: as when the opulence of the 
sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails 
to produce its effect on the large scale, is sud- 
denly revealed to him by the chance isola- 
tion — as he changes the position of his sun- 
shade — of a yard or two of roadway with 
its stones and weeds. And then, there is no 
end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards 
themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate 
and continually shifting: now you would say 
it was green, now gray, now blue; now tree 

74 • 



stands above tree, like '* cloud on cloud," 
massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, 
at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is 
shaken and broken up with little momentary 
silverings and shadows. But every one sees 
the world in his own way. To some the glad 
moment may have arrived on other provoca- 
tions; and their recollection may be most 
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying 
burthens on their heads; of tropical effects, 
with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of 
the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy- 
looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always 
as if they were being wielded and swept to- 
gether by a whirlwind; of the air coming, 
laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles 
and the scented underwood; of the empurpled 
hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of 
the green-gold air of the east at evening. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South. 

THE promise is so great, and we are all 
so easily led away when hope and mem- 
ory are both in one story, that I dare say the 
sick man is not very inconsolable when he 

75 



receives sentence of banishment, and is in- 
clined to regard his ill health as not the least 
fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he im- 
mediately undeceived. The stir and speed of 
the journey, and the restlessness that goes 
to bed with him as he tries to sleep betw^een 
two days of noisy progress, fever him, and 
stimulate his dull nerves into something of 
their old quickness and sensibility. And so he 
can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of 
the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vine- 
yard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory 
of fairy gold, which the first great winds of 
winter will transmute, as in the fable, into 
withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the 
admirable brevity and simplicity of such 
little glimpses of country and country ways 
as flash upon him through the windows of the 
train; little glimpses that have a character all 
their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow 
might see them from the wing, or Iris as she 
went abroad over the land on some Olympian 
errand. Here and there, indeed, a few chil- 
dren huzzah and wave their hands to the ex- 
press; but for the most part, it is an interrup- 



tion too brief and isolated to attract much 
notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; 
a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a 
canal boat, so precariously that it seems as if a 
fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be 
enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, 
and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and 
wood and iron have been precipitated roaring 
past her very ear, and there is not a start, nor a 
tremor, nor a turn of the averted head, to in- 
dicate that she has been even conscious of its 
passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attrac- 
tion of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and 
the train disturbs so little the scenes through 
which it takes us, that our heart becomes full 
of the placidity and stillness of the country; 
and while the body is borne forward in the 
flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, 
as the humour moves them, at unfrequented 
stations; they make haste up the poplar alley 
that leads toward the town; they are left be- 
hind with the signalman as, shading his eyes 
with his hand, he watches the long train sweep 
away in the golden distance. 
Moreover, there is still before the invalid the 



77 



shock of wonder and delight with which he 
will learn that he has passed the indefinable 
line that separates South from North. And 
this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes 
the consciousness is forced upon him early, 
on the occasion of some slight association, a 
colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes 
not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with 
the Southern sunshine peeping through the 
persiennes, and the Southern patois con- 
fusedly audible below the windows. Whether 
it come early or late, however, this pleasure 
will not end with the anticipation, as do so 
many others of the same family. It will leave 
him wider awake than it found him, and give 
a new significance to all he may see for many 
days to come. There is something in the miere 
name of the South that carries enthusiasm 
along with it. At the sound of the word, he 
pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to 
seek out beauties and to get by heart the per- 
manent lines and character of the landscape, 
as if he had been told that it was all his own 
— an estate out of which he had been kept 
unjustly, and which he was now to receive in 
_ 



free and full possession. Even those who have 
never been there before feel as if they had 
been; and everybody goes comparing, and 
seeking for the familiar, and finding it with 
such ecstasies of recognition, that one would 
think they were coming home after a weary 
absence, instead of travelling hourly farther 
abroad. Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South. 

THERE is only one wish realisable on the 
earth; only one thing that can be per- 
fectly attained: Death. And from a variety 
of circumstances we have no one to tell us 
whether it be worth attaining. 
A strange picture we make on our way to 
our chimeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging 
ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable, 
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall 
never reach the goal; it is even more than 
probable that there is no such place; and if we 
lived for centuries, and were endowed with 
the powers of a god, we should find ourselves 
not much nearer what we wanted at the end. 
O toiHng hands of mortals! O unwearied 
feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, 



The 
True 
Love 
Story 
I Begins 
with 
Mar- 
riage. 
Court- 
ship is 
the Pro- 
logue 



soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on 
some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way 
further, against the setting sun, descry the 
spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your 
own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a 
• better thing than to arrive, and the true success 
is to labour. Virginibus Puerisque. ElDorado. 

AGAIN, when you have married your 
.wife, you would think you were got upon 
a hilltop, and might begin to go downward 
by an easy slope. But you have only ended 
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love 
and winning love are often difficult tasks to 
overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep 
in love is also a business of some importance, 
to which both man and wife must bring kind- 
ness and goodwill. The true love story com- 
mences at the altar, when there lies before 
the married pair a most beautiful contest of 
wisdom and generosity, and a life-long strug- 
gle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattain- 
able ? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very 
fact that they are two instead of one. 

Virginibus Puerisque. El Dorado. 
_ __ 



TRUTH of intercourse is something more 
difficult than to refrain from open Hes. 
It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not 
tell the truth. It is not enough to answer 
formal questions. To reach the truth by yea 
and nay communications implies a questioner 
with a share of inspiration, such as is often 
found in mutual love. Tea and nay mean 
nothing; the meaning must have been related 
in the question. Many words are often neces- 
sary to convey a very simple statement; for 
in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; 
the most that we can hope is by many arrows, 
more or less far off on different sides, to in- 
dicate, in the course of time, for what target 
we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back 
and forward, to convey the purport of a single 
principle or a single thought. And yet while 
the curt, pithy speaker misses the point en- 
tirely, a wordy prolegomenous babbler will 
often add three new offences in the process 
of excusing one. It is really a most delicate 
affair. The world was made before the Eng- 
lish language, and seemingly upon a different 
design. Suppose we held our converse not in 



Silence a 
Method 
of Lying 



words but in music; those who have a bad 
ear would find themselves cut off from all 
near commerce, and no better than foreigners 
in this big v/orld. But we do not consider how 
many have ''a bad ear" for words, nor how 
often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. 
I hate questioners and questions; there are 
so few that can be spoken to without a lie. 
^' Do you forgive me? " Madam and sweet- 
heart, so far as I have gone in life I have 
never yet been able to discover what forgive- 
ness means. *' Is it still the same between usF" 
Why, how can it be .? It is eternally different; 
and yet you are still the friend of my heart. 
''Do you understand meP" God knows; I 
should think it highly improbable. 
The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A 
man may have sat in a room for hours and 
not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that 
room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. 
And how many loves have perished because, 
from pride, or spite, or indifference, or that 
unmanly shame which withholds a man from 
daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the crit- 
ical point of the relation, has but hung his 



82 



head and held his tongue. And, again, a he 
may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed 
through a he. Truth to facts is not always 
truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as 
often happens in answer to a question, may 
be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an 
exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is 
that which you must neither garble nor belie. 
The whole tenor of a conversation is a part 
of the meaning of each separate statement; 
the beginning and the end define and trav- 
esty the intermediate conversation. You 
never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, 
full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, 
rightly understood, is not to state the true 
facts, but to convey a true expression; truth 
in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. 
To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical dis- 
cretion is often needful, not so much to gain a 
kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. 
Women have an ill name in this connection, 
yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a 
good woman is the true index of her heart. 

Virginibus Puerisque. IV. 



83 



Talk 



THERE are always two to a talk, giving 
and talking, comparing experience and 
according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tenta- 
tive, continually "in further search and prog- 
ress"; while written words remain fixed, be- 
come idols even to the writer, found wooden 
dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious 
error in the amber of the truth. Last and 
chief, while literature, gagged with linsey- 
woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the 
life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call 
a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing 
immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it 
would, become merely aesthetic or merely 
classical like literature. A jest intervenes, 
the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, 
and speech runs forth out of the contemporary 
groove into the open fields of nature, cheery 
and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. 
And it is in talk alone that we can learn our 
period and ourselves. In short, the first duty 
of a man is to speak; that is his chief business 
in this world; and talk, which is the harmo- 
nious speech of two or more, is by far the 
most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing 



84 



in money; it is all profit; it completes our edu- 
cation, founds and fosters our friendships, 
and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost 
any state of health. . . . Now, the relation 
that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly 
that airy one of friendship; and hence, I 
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly 
arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both 
the scene and instrument of friendship. It is 
in talk alone that the friends can measure 
strength, and enjoy that amicable counter- 
assertion of personality which is the gauge 
of relations and the sport of life. 
A. good talk is not to be had for the asking. 
Humours must first be accorded in a kind of 
overture or prologue; hour, company and 
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit 
juncture, the subject, the quarry of two 
heated minds, spring up like a deer out of 
the wood. Not that the talker has any of the 
hunter's pride, though he has all and more 
than all his ardour. The genuine artist fol- 
lows the stream of conversation as an angler 
follows the windings of a brook, not dallying 
where he fails to *'kill." He trusts implicitly 



Natural 
Talk a 
Festival 
ofOsten- 
tation 



to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual 
variety, continual pleasure, and those chang- 
ing prospects of the truth that are the best 
education. There is nothing in a subject, so 
called, that we should regard it as an idol, or 
follow it beyond the promptings of desire. 
Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as 
they are truly talkable, more than the half of 
them may be reduced to three; that I am I, 
that you are you, and that there are other 
people dimly understood to be not quite the 
same as either. Wherever talk may range, it 
still runs half the time on these eternal lines. 
The theme being set, each plays on himself 
as on an instrument; asserts and justifies 
himself; ransacks his brain for instances and 
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, 
to his own surprise and the admiration of his 
adversary. All natural talk is a festival of 
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each 
accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is 
from that reason that we venture to lay our- 
selves so open, that we dare to be so warmly 
eloquent, and that Vv^e swell in each other's 
eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers. 



once launched, begin to overflow the hmits 
of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height 
of their secret pretensions, and give them- 
selves out for the heroes, brave, pious, mu- 
sical and wise, that in their most shining 
moments they aspire to be. So they weave for 
themselves with words and for a while in- 
habit a palace of delights, temple at once and 
theatre, where they fill the round of the world's 
dignitaries, and feast with the gods, exulting 
in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each 
goes his w^ay, still flushed with vanity and 
admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each 
declines from the height of his ideal orgie, 
not in a moment, but by slow declension. I 
remember, in the entracte of an afternoon 
performance, coming forth into the sunshine, 
in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a 
romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the 
music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit 
there and evaporate *'The Flying Dutch- 
man" (for it was that I had been hearing) 
with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well- 
being and pride; and the noises of the city 
voices, bells and marching feet, fell together 



in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In 
the same way, the excitement of a good talk 
lives for a long while after in the blood, the 
heart still hot within you, the brain still sim- 
mering, and the physical earth swimming 
around you with the colours of the sunset. 
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a 
large surface of life, rather than dig mines 
into geological strata. Masses of experience, 
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, 
historical instances, the whole flotsam and 
jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon 
the matter in hand from every point of the 
compass, and from every degree of mental 
elevation and abasement — these are the ma- 
terials with which talk is fortified, the food on 
which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is 
proper to the exercise should still be brief 
and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; 
by the apposite, not the expository. It should 
keep close along the lines of humanity, near 
the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level 
where history, fiction and experience inter- 
sect and illuminate each other. I am I, and 
you are you, with all my heart; but conceive 



how these lean propositions change and 
brighten when, instead of words, the actual 
you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed 
in the live body, and the very clothes uttering 
voices to corroborate the story in the face. 
Not less surprising is the change when we 
leave off to speak of generalities — the bad, 
the good, the miser, and all the characters of 
Theophrastus — and call up other men, by 
anecdote or instance, in their very trick or 
feature; or trading on a common knowledge, 
toss each other famous names, still glowing 
with the hues of life. Communication is no 
longer by w^ords, but by the instancing of 
whole biographies, epics, systems of philoso- 
phy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That 
which is understood excels that which is 
spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas 
thus figured and personified change hands, 
as we may say, like coin; and the speakers 
imply without effort the most obscure and 
intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a 
large common ground of reading will, for 
this reason, come the sooner to the grapple 
of genuine converse. If they know Othello 

8^ 



and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Har- 
lowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can 
leave generalities and begin at once to speak 
by figures. . . . Conclusions, indeed, are not 
often reached by talk any more than by pri- 
vate thinking. That is not the profit. The 
profit is in the exercise, and above all in the 
experience; for when we reason at large on 
any subject, v/e review our state and history 
in life. From time to time, however, and espe- 
cially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes 
effective, conquering like war, widening the 
boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. 
A point arises; the question takes a problem- 
atical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers 
begin to feel lively presentiments of some 
conclusions near at hand; towards this they 
strive with emulous ardour, each by his own 
path, and struggling for first utterance; and 
then one leaps upon the summit of that mat- 
ter with a shout, and almost at the same mo- 
ment the other is beside him; and behold 
they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is 
illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been 
wound and unwound out of words. But the 



90 



sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy 
and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker 
such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither 
new nor far apart; they are attained with 
speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; 
and by the nature of the process, they are 
always worthily shared. There is a certain 
attitude, combative at once and deferential, 
eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, 
which marks out at once the talkable man. 
It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, 
but a certain proportion of all of these that I 
love to encounter in my amicable adver- 
saries. They must not be pontiffs holding 
doctrine, but huntsmen questing after ele- 
ments of truth. Neither must they be toys to 
be instructed, but fellow-teachers v/ith whom 
I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. 
We must reach some solution, some shadow 
of consent: for without that, eager talk be- 
comes a torture. But we do not wish to reach 
it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle 
and effort wherein pleasure lies. ... It is the 
mark of genuine conversation that the say- 
ings can scarce be quoted with their full 



91 



effect beyond the circle of common friends. 
To have their proper weight they should ap- 
pear in a biography, and with the portrait of 
the speaker. Good talk is dramatic; it is like 
an impromptu piece of acting where each 
should represent himself to the greatest ad- 
vantage; and that is the best kind of talk 
where each speaker is most fully and candidly 
himself, and where, if you were to shift the 
speeches round from one to another, there 
would be the greatest loss in significance and 
perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk de- 
pends so wholly on our company. We should 
like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or 
Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk 
with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, 
by the Protean quality of man, can talk to 
some degree with all; but the true talk, that 
strikes out all the slum^bering best of us, 
comes only with the peculiar brethren of our 
spirits, is founded as deep as love in the con- 
stitution of our being, and is a thing to relish 
with all our energy, while yet we have it, and 
to be grateful for forever. 

Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 



92 



I ^HE child, the seed, the grain of corn, 
-*- The acorn on the hill. 
Each for some separate end is born 
In season fit, and still 

Each must in strength arise to work the al- 
mighty will. 

So from the hearth the children flee, 
By that almighty hand 
Austerely led; so one by sea 
Goes forth, and one by land; 
Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from 
that command. 

So from the sally each obeys 
The unseen almighty nod; 
So till the ending all their ways 
Blindfolded both have trod: 
Nor knew their task at all, but were the 
tools of God. 

And as the fervent smith of love 
Beat out the glowing blade, 
Nor wielded in the front of war 
The weapons he had made, 
But in the tower at home still plied his ring- 
ing trade ; 



The 

Mother 

and 

Child 

must 

Part 



93 



So like a sword the son shall roam 
On nobler missions sent; 
And as the smith remained at home 
In peaceful turret pent, 

So sits the while at home the mother well 
content. Underwoods. 



Silence 

in 

Speech 



AS for those who are restricted to silence, I 
can only wonder how they bear their 
solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart 
from any view of mortification, I can see a 
certain policy, not only in the exclusion of 
women, but in this vow of silence. I have had 
some experience of lay phalansteries, of an 
artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; 
and seen more than one association easily 
formed and yet more easily dispersed. With 
a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have 
lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women 
it is but a touch-and-go association that 
can be formed among defenceless men; the 
stronger electricity is sure to trium.ph; the 
dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, 
are abandoned after an interview of ten min- 
utes, and the arts and sciences, and profes- 

94 



slonal male jollity, deserted at once for two 
sweet eyes and a caressing accent. And next 
after this, the tongue is the great divider. 

Travels with a Donkey. 
— f-h- 

OTO be up and doing, O 
Unfearing and unshamed to go 
In all the uproar and the press 
About my human business! 
My undissuaded heart I hear 
Whisper courage in my ear. 
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth 
Summons me to a daily birth. 
Thou, O my love, ye, O my friends — 
The gist of life, the end of ends — 
To laugh, to love, to live, to die, 
Ye call me by the ear and eye! 

Our Lady of the Snows. UnderzvooJs. 

CONTEND, my soul, for moments and 
for hours; 
Each is with service pregnant; each re- 
claimed 
Is as a kingdom conquered, where to reign. 

Underwoods. 



95 



Rest 
after 
Death 



UNDER the wide and starry sky, 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Gladly did I live and gladly die. 

And I laid me dow^n v^ith a will. 

This be the verse you grave for me: 
Here he lies where he longed to be; 
Home IS the sailor, home from sea, 

And the hunter home from the hill. 

Requiem. Underwoods. 



Telling 

the 

Truth 



AMONG sayings that have a currency in 
spite of being wholly false upon the face 
of them for the sake of a half-truth upon an- 
other subject which is accidentally combined 
with the error, one of the grossest and broad- 
est conveys the monstrous proposition that 
it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a 
lie. I wish heartily that it were. But the truth 
is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly 
and exactly uttered. Even with instruments 
specially contrived for such a purpose — 
with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite — 
it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to 
be inexact. From those who mark the divi- 



96 



sions on a scale to those who measure the 
boundaries of empires or the distance of the 
heavenly stars, it is by careful method and 
minute, unwearying attention that men rise 
even to material exactness or to sure knowl- 
edge even of external and constant things. 
But it is easier to draw the outline of a moun- 
tain than the changing appearance of a face; 
and truth in human relations is of this more 
intangible and dubious order; hard to seize, 
harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a 
loose, colloquial sense — not to say that I 
have been in Malabar, when as a matter of 
fact I was never out of England, not to say 
that I have read Cervantes in the original, 
when as a matter of fact I know not one syl- 
lable of Spanish, — this, indeed, is easy, and 
to the same degree unimportant in itself. 
Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, 
may or may not be important; in a certain 
sense even they may or may not be false. The 
habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, 
and live truly with his wife and friends; while 
another man who never told a formal false- 
hood in his life may yet be himself one lie — 

97 



heart and face, from top to bottom. This Is 
the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, 
vice versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a 
relation, truth to your own heart and your 
friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — 
that is the truth which makes love possible 
and mankind happy. 

Virginihus Puerisque. IV. 



Travel 



FOR my part, I travel not to go anywhere, 
but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The 
great affair is to move; to feel the needs and 
hitches of our life more nearly; to come down 
off this feather-bed of civilization, and find 
the globe granite underfoot and strewn with 
cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and 
are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a 
holiday is a thing that must be worked for. 
To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against 
a gale out of the freezing north is no high in- 
dustry, but it is one that serves to occupy 
and compose the mind. And when the present 
Is so exacting, who can annoy himself about 
the future ? Travels with a Donkey. 



98 



BUT we are all travellers in what John 
Bunyan calls the wilderness of the world, 
— all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the 
best that we find in our travels is an honest 
friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds 
many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They 
are the end and the reward of life. They keep 
us worthy ourselves; and when we are alone, 
we are only nearer to the absent. 

Travels with a Donkey. 

BUT it is at night, and after dinner, that the 
best hour comes. There are no such pipes 
to be smoked as those that follow a good day's 
march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to 
be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so 
full and so fine. If you wind up the evening 
with grog, you will own there was never such 
grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads 
about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. 
If you read a book — and you will never do 
so save by fits and starts — you find the lan- 
guage strangely racy and harmonious; words 
take a new meaning; single sentences possess 
the ear for half an hour together; and the 

99 



writer endears himself to you, at every page, 
by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It 
seems as if it were a book you had written 
yourself in a dream. To all we have read on 
such occasions we look back with special fa- 
vour. *'It was on the loth of April, 1798," 
says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, ''that 
I sat down to a volume of the new Heloise, at 
the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry 
and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote 
more, for though we are mighty fine fellows 
nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, 
talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays 
would be a capital pocketbook on such a 
journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs, 
and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair 
experience. 

If the evening be fine and warm, there is noth- 
ing better in life than to lounge before the 
inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet 
of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the 
quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste 
Joviality to the full significance of that auda- 
cious word. Your muscles are so agreeably 
slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so 



idle, that whether you move or sit still, what- 
ever you do is done with pride and with a 
kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with 
any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And 
it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more 
than of anything else, of all narrowness and 
pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, 
as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside 
all your own hobbies, to watch provincial 
humours develop themselves before you, now 
as a laughable farce, and now grave and beau- 
tiful like an old tale. 

Or, perhaps you are left to your own company 
for the night, and surly weather imprisons 
you by the fire. You may remember how 
Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells 
upon the hours when he has been "happy 
thinking." It is a phrase that may well per- 
plex a poor modern, girt about on every side 
by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at 
night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all 
so busy, and have so many far-oflF projects 
to realize, and castles in the fire to turn into 
solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, 
^ that we can find no time for pleasure trips in- 



to the Land of Thought and among the Hills 
of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we 
must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded 
hands; and a changed world for most of us, 
when we find we can pass the hours without 
discontent, and be happy thinking. We are 
in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be 
gathering gear, to make our voice audible a 
moment in the derisive silence of eternity, 
that we forget that one thing, of which these 
are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall 
in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro 
upon the earth like frightened sheep. And 
now you are to ask yourself if, when all is 
done, you would not have been better to sit 
by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. 
To sit still and contemplate, — to remember 
the faces of women without desire, to be 
pleased by the great deeds of men without 
envy, to be everything and everywhere in 
sympathy, and yet content to remain where 
and what you are — is not this to know both 
wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happi- 
ness ? After all, it is not they w^ho carry flags, 
but they who look upon it from a private 



chamber, who have the fun of the procession. 
And once you are at that, you are in the very 
humour of all social heresy. It is no time for 
shuffling, or for big, empty words. If you ask 
yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or 
learning, the answer is far to seek; and you 
go back to that kingdom of light imagina- 
tions, which seem so vain in the eyes of Phil- 
istines perspiring after wealth, and so mo- 
mentous to those who are stricken with the 
disproportions of the world, and, in the face 
of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split dif- 
ferences between two degrees of the infini- 
tesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the 
Roman Empire, a million of money or a 
fiddlestick's end. 

You lean from the window, your last pipe 
reeking whitely into the darkness, your body 
full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned 
in the seventh circle of content; when sud- 
denly the mood changes, the weathercock 
goes about, and you ask yourself one ques- 
tion more: whether, for the interval, you have 
been the wisest philosopher or the most 
egregious of donkeys ^ Human experience is 



103 



Biv- 
ouacs. 
The 
Halts 
in Life 



not yet able to reply; but at least you have 
had a fine moment, and looked down upon 
all the kingdoms of the earth. 

Virginihus Puerisque, Walking Tours. 

^^J OR must I forget to say a word on 
-^ ^ bivouacs. You come to a milestone on 
a hill, or some place where deep ways meet 
under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and 
down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. 
You sink into yourself, and the birds come 
round and look at you; and your smoke dis- 
sipates upon the afternoon under the blue 
dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon 
your feet, and the cool air visits your neck 
and turns aside your open shirt. If you are 
not happy, you must have an evil conscience. 
You may dally as long as you like by the 
roadside. It is almost as if the millennium 
were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks 
and watches over the housetop, and remem- 
ber time and seasons no more. Not to keep 
hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to 
live forever. You have no idea, unless you 
have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's '-j 



day, that you measure out only by hunger, 
and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. 
I know a village where there are hardly any 
clocks, where no one knows more of the days 
of the week than by a sort of instinct for the 
fete on Sundays, and where only one person 
can tell you the day of the month, and she is 
generally wrong; and if people were aware 
how slow Time journeyed in that village, 
and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, 
over and above the bargain, to its wise in- 
habitants, I believe there would be a stam- 
pede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a 
variety of large towns, where the clocks lose 
their heads, and shake the hours out each 
one faster than the other, as though they were 
all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims 
would each bring his own misery along with 
him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, 
there were no clocks or watches in the much- 
vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of 
course, there were no appointments, and 
punctuality was not yet thought upon. 
"Though ye take from a covetous man all 
his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one 



105 



A Walk- 
ing Tour 



jewel left; men cannot deprive him of his 
covetousness." And so I would say of a mod- 
ern man of business, you may do what you 
will for him, put him in Eden, give him the 
elixir of life — he has still a flaw at heart, he 
still has his business habits. Now, there is no 
time when business habits are more mitigated 
than on a walking tour. And so, during these 
halts, as I say, you will feel almost free. 

Virginihus Puerisque. Walking Tours. 

NOW, to be properly enjoyed, a walking 
tour should be gone upon alone. If you 
go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no 
longer a walking tour in anything but name; 
it is something else and more in the nature of 
a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon 
alone, because freedom is of the essence; be- 
cause you should be able to stop and go on, 
and follow this way or that, as the freak takes 
you; and because you must have your own 
pace, and neither trot along a champion 
walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And 
then you must be open to all impressions 
and let your thoughts take colour from what 

io6 



you see. You should be as a pipe for any 
wind to play upon. *'I cannot see the wit," 
says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the 
same time. When I am in the country I wish 
to vegetate like the country," — which is the 
gist of all that can be said upon the matter. 
There should be no cackle of voices at your 
elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the 
morning. And so long as a man is reasoning 
he cannot surrender himself to that fine in- 
toxication that comes of such motion in the 
open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and 
sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace 
that passes comprehension. 
During the first day or so of any tour there 
are moments of bitterness, when the traveller 
feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, 
when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily 
over the hedge, and, like Christian on a sim- 
ilar occasion, "give three leaps and go on 
singing." And yet it soon acquires a property 
of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit 
of the journey enters into it. And no sooner 
have you passed the straps over your shoulder 
than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, 

107 



you pull yourself together with a shake, and 
fall at once into your stride. And surely, of 
all possible moods, this, in which a man takes 
the road, is the best. Of course, if he will keep 
thinking of his anxieties, if he will open the 
merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in- 
arm with the hag — why, wherever he is, 
and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances 
are that he will not be happy. And so much 
the more shame to himself! There are per- 
haps thirty men setting forth at that same 
hour, and I would lay a large wager there is 
not another dull face among the thirty. It 
would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of 
darkness, one after another of these way- 
farers, some summer morning, for the first 
few miles upon the road. This one, who walks 
fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all con- 
centrated in his own mind; he is up at his 
loom, weaving and weaving, to set the land- 
scape to words. This one peers about, as he 
goes, among the grasses: he waits by the canal 
to watch the dragon-flies; he leans on the 
gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough 
upon the complacent kine. And here comes 

io8 



another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating 
to himself. His face changes from time to 
time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or 
anger clouds his forehead. He is composing 
articles, delivering orations, and conducting 
the most impassioned interviews, by the way. 
A little farther on, and it is as like as not he 
will begin to sing. And well for him, suppos- 
ing him to be no great master in that art, if 
he stumble across no stolid peasant at a cor- 
ner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know 
which is the more troubled, or whether it is 
worse to suffer the confusion of your trou- 
badour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. 
A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, 
to the strange mechanical bearing of the com- 
mon tramp, can in no wise explain to itself 
the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man 
who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, be- 
cause, although a full-grown person with a 
red beard, he skipped as he went, like a child. 
And you would be astonished if I were to tell 
you all the grave and learned heads who have 
confessed to me that, when on walking tours, 
^they sang — and sang very ill — and had a 



109 



The 

Place of 
Money 
in Life 



pair of red ears when, as described above, the' 
inauspicious peasant plumped into their 
arms from round a corner. And here, lest you 
should think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt's 
own confession, from his essay "On Going a 
Journey," which is so good that there should 
be a tax levied on all who have not read it: 
"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," 
says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, 
a winding road before me, and a three hours' 
march to dinner — and then to thinking! It 
is hard if I cannot start some game on these 
lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for 

Virgtnibus Puerisque. A Walking Tour. 

FOR money enters in two different char- 
acters into the scheme of life. A certain 
amount, varying with the number and empire 
of our desires, is a true necessary for each 
one of us in the present order of society; but 
beyond that amount, money is a commodity 
to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury 
in which we may either indulge or stint our- 
selves, like any other. And there are many ^ J 



luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to 
it, such as a grateful conscience, a country 
life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite, 
flat, and obvious as this conclusion may ap- 
pear, we have only to look round us in society 
to see how scantily it has been recognised; 
and perhaps even ourselves, after a little re- 
flection, may decide to spend a trifle less for 
money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more 
in the article of freedom. Familiar Studies of 
Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau. 



YOU see you cannot separate the soldier 
from the brigand; and what is a thief 
but an isolated brigand with circumspect 
manners ? I steal a couple of mutton chops, 
without so much as disturbing people's sleep; 
the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the 
less wholesomely on what remains. You come 
up blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away 
the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully 
into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am 
only Tom, Dick or Harry; I am a rogue and a 
dog, and hanging's too good for me — with 
all my heart; but just ask the farmer which 



Putting 
Ques- 
tions 



of US he prefers, just find out which of us he 
Hes awake to curse on cold nights. Frangois 
Villon, in *' A Lodging for the Night." 

IFEEL very strongly about putting ques- 
tions; it partakes too much of the style of 
the day of judgment. You start a question, 
and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly 
on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, 
starting others; and presently some bland old 
bird (the last you would have thought of) is 
knocked on the head in his own back garden 
and the family have to change their name. 
Mr. Enfield in ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 



All 

Opinion 
Stages 
on the 
Road to 
Truth 



OPINION in good men," says Milton, 
"is but knowledge in the making." 
All opinions, properly so called, are stages 
on the road to truth. It does not follow that a 
man will travel any further; but if he has 
really considered the world and drawn a con- 
clusion, he has travelled as far. This does not 
apply to formulae got by rote, which are 
on the road to nowhere but second 

a catch- 



stages 



childhood and the grave. To have 



nC \ ] ] 

word in your mouth is not the same thing as 

to hold an opinion; still less is it the same 
thing as to have made one for yourself. There 
are too many of these catchwords in the world 
for people to rap out upon you like an oath 
and by the way of an argument. They have a 
currency as intellectual counters; and many 
respectable persons pay their way with noth- 
ing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies 
of theory in the background. The imputed 
virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments 
is supposed to reside in them, just as some of 
the majesty of the British Empire dwells in 
the constable's truncheon. They are used in 
pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil 
Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they 
are vastly serviceable for checking unprofit- 
able discussion and stopping the mouths of 
babes and sucklings. And when the young 
man comes to a certain stage of intellectual 
growth, the examination of these counters 
forms a gymnastic at once amusing and forti- 
fying to the mind. 

Because I have reached Paris, I am not 
ashamed of having passed through New- 

"3 



Opinion 
is the 
Tavern 
by the 
Way in 
which 
we 

Dwell 
a Little 
While 
on our 
Way to 
Truth 



haven and Dieppe. They were very good 
places to pass through, and I am none the less 
at my destination. All my old opinions were 
only stages on the way to the one I now hold, 
as itself is only a stage on the way to some- 
thing else. I am no more abashed at having 
been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my 
own than at having been a sucking infant. 
Doubtless the world is quite right in a million 
ways; but you have to be kicked about a little 
to convince you of the fact. And in the mican- 
while you must do something, be something, 
believe something. It is not possible to keep 
the mind in a state of accurate balance and 
blank; and even if you could do so, instead 
of coming ultimately to the right conclusion, 
you would be very apt to remain in a state of 
balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in 
quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthu- 
siasm is not a thing to be ashamed of, in the 
retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very 
zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder 
Christian. For my part, I look back to the 
time when I was a Socialist with something 
like regret. I have convinced myself (for the 

114 



i''^^ 



moment) that we had better leave these 
great changes to what we call great blind 
forces; their blindness being so much more 
perspicacious than the little, peering, partial 
eyesight of men. I seem to see that my ow^n 
scheme would not answer; and all the other 
schemes I ever heard propounded would de- 
press some elements of goodness just as much 
as they encouraged others. Now I know that 
in this turning Conservative with years, I am 
going through the normal cycle of change 
and travelling in the common orbit of men's 
opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit 
to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of grow- 
ing age or else of failing animal heat; but I 
do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a 
change for the better — I daresay it is de- 
plorably for the worse. I have no choice in 
the business, and can no more resist this ten- 
dency of my mind than I could prevent my 
body from beginning to totter and decay. If 
I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall 
doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; 
but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when 
the time comes, shall I plume myself on the 

"5 



Wom- 
an's Self- 
suffi- 
ciency 



immunity. Just in the same way, I do not 
greatly pride myself on having outlived my 
belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old 
people have faults of their own; they tend to 
become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. 
Whether from the growth of experience or the 
decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to 
these and certain other faults; and it follows, 
of course, that while in one sense I hope I am 
journeying towards the truth, in another I am 
indubitably posting towards these forms and 
sources of error. Virginibus Puerisque. Crab- 
bed A (re and Touth. 

o 

THE sex likes to pick up knowledge, and 
yet preserves its superiority. It is a good 
policy, and almost necessary in the circum- 
stances. If a man finds a woman admires him, 
were it only for his acquaintance with geog- 
raphy, he will begin at once to build upon 
the admiration. It is only by unintermittent 
snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in 
our place. Men, as Miss Hozve, or Miss /i/^r- 
/oiu^, would have said, "are suchencroachers." 
For my part, I am body and soul with the p 



ii6 



women; and after a well-married couple, 
there is nothing so beautiful in the world as 
the myth of the divine huntress. It is no use 
for a man to take to the woods; we know him; 
Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and 
had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But 
there is this about some women, which over- 
tops the best gymnosophist among men, that 
they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a 
high and cold zone without the countenance 
of any trousered being. I declare, although 
the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more 
obliged to women for this ideal than I should 
be to the majority of them, or indeed to any 
but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is 
nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of 
self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim 
and lovely maidens, running the woods all 
night to the note of Diana's horn; moving 
among the old oaks as fancy-free as they; 
things of the forest and the starlight, not 
touched by the commotion of man's hot and 
turbid life — although there are plenty other 
ideals that I should prefer — I find my heart 
beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in 



117 



Repre- 
senta- 
tive Men 
and 
Their 
Works 



life, but to fail with what a grace! That is 
not lost which is not regretted. And where — 
here slips out the male — where would be 
much of the glory of inspiring love, if there 
were no contempt to overcome ? 

An Inland Voyage. 

EN who are in any way typical of a stage 



M^i 



progress may be compared more 
justly to the hand upon the dial of a clock, 
which continues to advance as it indicates, 
than to the stationary milestone, which is 
only the measure of what is past. The move- 
ment is not arrested. That significant some- 
thing by which the work of such a man differs 
from that of his predecessors goes on dis- 
engaging itself and becoming more and more 
articulate and cognisable. The same principle 
of growth that carried his first book beyond 
the books of previous writers carries his last 
book beyond his first. And just as the most 
imbecile production of any literary age gives 
us sometimes the very clue to comprehension 
we have sought long and vainly in contem- 
porary masterpieces, so it may be the very 
— 



weakest of an author's books that, coming in 
the sequel of many others, enables us at last 
to get hold of what underlies the whole of 
them — of that spinal marrow of significance 
that unites the work of his life into something 
organic and rational. Familiar Studies of Men 
and Books. Victor Hugo's Romances. 

THE person, man or dog, who has a con- 
science is eternally condemned to some 
degree of humbug; the sense of the law in 
their members fatally precipitates either 
towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the 
converse is true; and in the elaborate and con- 
scious manners of the dog, moral opinions 
and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To 
follow for ten minutes in the street some 
swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a 
lesson in dramatic art and the cultured con- 
duct of the body; in every act or gesture you 
see him true to a refined conception; and the 
dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear 
and proceeds to imitate and parody that 
charming ease. For to be a high-mannered 
and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, 



119 



and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog.' 
The large dog, so much lazier, so much more 
weighed upon with matter, so majestic with 
repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the 
dramatic means to wholly represent the part. 
And it is more pathetic and perhaps more in- 
structive to consider the small dog in his 
conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo 
Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is 
feudal and religious; the ever-present polythe- 
ism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, 
rules them on the one hand; on the other, 
their singular difference of size and strength 
among themselves effectually prevents the 
appearance of the democratic notion. Or we 
might more exactly compare their society to 
the curious spectacle presented by a school — 
ushers, monitors, and big and little boys — 
qualified by one circumstance, the introduc- 
tion of the other sex. In each, we should 
observe a somewhat similar tension of man- 
ner, and somewhat similar points of honour. 
In each the larger animal keeps a contemptu- 
ous good humour; in each the smaller annoys 
himwithwasp-like impudence, certain of prac- 



tical immunity; in each we shall find a double 
life producing double characters, and an ex- 
cursive and noisy heroism combined with a 
fair amount of practical timidity. I have 
known dogs, and I have known school heroes 
that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been 
told apart; and if we desire to understand the 
chivalry of old, we must turn to the school 
playfields of the dungheap where the dogs are 
trooping. Memories and Portraits. The Char- 
acter of Dogs. 



AGAIN, the husband in these [marriage] 
unions, is usually a man, and the wife 
commonly enough a woman; and when this 
is the case, although it makes the firmer mar- 
riage, a thick additional veil of misconception 
hangs about the doubtful business. Women, 
I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but 
then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I 
should hold the reverse, and at least we all 
enter more or less wholly into one or other of 
these camps. A man who delights women by 
his feminine perceptions will often scatter his 
admirers by a chance explosion of the under 



side of man; and the most masculine and 
direct of women will some day, to your dire 
surprise, draw out like a telescope into suc- 
cessive lengths of personation. Alas! for the 
man, knowing her to be at heart more candid 
than himself, who shall flounder, panting, 
through these mazes in the quest forthwith. 
The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, 
eternally surprising to the other. Between the 
Latin and the Teuton races, there are similar 
divergencies, not to be bridged by the most 
liberal sympathy. And in the good, plain, 
cut-and-dry explanations of life, which pass 
current among us as the Wisdom of the elders, 
this difficulty has been turned with the aid of 
pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has 
angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, 
plays all day long on the piano, and sings 
ravishingly in church, it requires a rough in- 
fidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe 
that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so 
it is; she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a 
thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and 
no heart. My compliments to George Eliot 
for her Rosamund Vincy; the ugly work of' 



satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, 
by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the 
satire was much wanted for the education of 
men. That doctrine of the excellence of 
women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as 
well as false. It is better to face the fact, and 
know, w^hen you marry, that you take into 
your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frail- 
ties; whose weak human heart beats no more 
tunefully than yours. 

Virginihus Puerisque. II. 
■ I ! ■ 

THERE is always a new horizon for on- 
ward-looking men, and although we 
dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty 
business and not enduring beyond a brief 
period of years, we are so constituted that 
our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the 
term of hoping is prolonged until the term of 
life. To be truly happy is a question of how 
we begin and not of how we end, of what we 
want and not of what we have. An aspiration 
is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a 
landed estate, a fortune which we can never 
exhaust and which gives us year by year a 

123 



revenue of pleasurable activity. To have 
many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life 
is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre 
unless we have some interest in the piece; 
and to those who have neither art nor science, 
the world is a mere arrangement of colours, 
or a rough footway where they may very well 
break their shins. It is in virtue of his own 
desires and curiosities that any man con- 
tinues to exist with even patience, that he is 
charmed with the look of things and people, 
and that he awakens every morning with a 
renewed appetite for work and pleasure. 
Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through 
which he sees the world in the most enchanted 
colours; it is they that make women beautiful 
or fossils interesting; and the man may squan- 
der his estate and come to beggary, but if he 
keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the 
possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could 
take one meal so compact and comprehensive 
that he should never hunger any more; sup- 
pose him, at a glance, to take in all the fea- 
tures of the world and allay the desire for 
knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any 

124 



province of experience — would not that man 
be in a poor way for amusement ever after ? 

Virginibus Puerisque. El Dorado. 



125 



CHARACTER 



I I NE such face I now remember; one such 
^^ blank some half-dozen of us labour to 
dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful 
in person, most serene and genial by disposi- 
tion; full of racy words and quaint thoughts. 
Laughter attended on his coming. He had 
the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal 
with his equals, and to the poorest student 
gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside 
in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play 
with us, but held him marked for higher des- 
tinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely 
had my pride more gratified than when he 
sat at my father's table, my acknowledged 
friend. So he walked among us, both hands 
full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the 
seeds of a most influential life. 
The powers and the ground of friendship is a 
mystery; but, looking back, I can discern 
that, in part, we loved the J:hing he was, for 
some shadow of what he was to be. For with 
all his beauty, breeding, urbanity and mirth, 
there was in those days something soulless in 
our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, 
witty, innocent and inhumane; and by a mis- 



I2g 



applied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish hon- 
est sentiment. I can still see and hear him, as 
he went his way along the lamplit streets. 
La ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble figure 
of youth, but following vanity and incredulous 
of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the 
high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, 
his patrimony and his self-respect, miserably 
went down. 

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he 
came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money 
and consideration; creeping to the family he 
had deserted; with broken wing, never more 
to rise. But in his face there was a light of 
knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds 
of his body he was never healed; died of them 
gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his 
wounded pride, we knew only from his si- 
lence. He returned to that city where he had 
lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there 
alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the ir- 
retrievable; at times still grappling with that 
mortal frailty that had brought him down; 
still joying in his friends' successes; his laugh 
still ready but with a kindlier music; and over 

130 



'1% 



all his thoughts the shadow of that unalter- 
able law which he had disavowed and which 
had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily 
evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great 
while dying, still without complaint, still 
finding interests; to his last step gentle, ur- 
bane and with the will to smile. 
The tale of this great failure is, to those who 
remained true to him, the tale of a success. 
In his youth he took thought for no one but 
himself; when he came ashore again, his 
whole armada lost, he seemed to think of 
none but others. Such was his tenderness for 
others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and 
pride, that of that impure passion of remorse 
he never breathed a syllable; even regret was 
rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You 
would not have dreamed, if you had known 
him then, that this was that great failure, that 
beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole 
society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often 
have we gone to him, red-hot with our own 
hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in 
our princely bed of life, and he would pa- 
tiently give ear and wisely counsel; and it was 

131 



only upon some return of our own thoughts that 
we were reminded what manner of man this 
was to whom we disembosomed; a man, by his 
own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of 
his gifts; his whole city of hope both 
ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the 
deliverer. Then something took us by the 
throat; and to see him there, so gentle, pa- 
tient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast 
down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admira- 
tion that we could not dare to pity him. Even 
if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke 
our wonder that, in that lost battle, he should 
have still the energy to fight. He had gone to 
ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, like one 
who condescended; but once ruined, with the 
lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. 
Most men, finding themselves the authors of 
their own disgrace, rail the louder against 
God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, 
oblige their friends to share the bitterness of 
that repentance. But he had held an inquest 
and passed sentence: mene, mene; and con- 
demned himself to smiling silence. He had 
given trouble enough; had earned misfortune 

132 



amply, and foregone the right to murmur. 
Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, care- 
less in his days of strength; but on the coming 
of adversity, and when that strength was gone 
that had betrayed him — *'for our strength 
is weakness" — he began to blossom and 
bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: 
the burden that he bore thrown down before 
the great deliverer. We 

"in the vast cathedral leave him; 
God accept him, 
Christ receive him!" 

If we go now and look on these innumerable 
epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are 
strangely fled. They do not stand merely to 
the dead, these foolish monuments; they are 
pillars and legends set up to glorify the diffi- 
cult but not desperate life of man. This 
ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. I 
see the indifferent pass before my friend's 
resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, 
marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. 
A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a 
pity most uncalled for, and an ignorant won- 

133 



The 

Selfish- 
ness of 
Youth 



der. Before those who loved him, his memory 
shines Hke a reproach; they honour him for 
silent lessons; they cherish his example; and 
in what remains before them of their toil, fear 
to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud 
man was one of those who prospered in the 
valley of humiliation; — of whom Bunyan 
wrote that, ''Though Christian had the hard 
hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I 
must tell you, that in former times men have 
met with angels here; have found pearls here; 
and have in this place found the words of 
life." Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits. 

I WOULD fain strike a note that should be 
more heroical; but the ground of all 
youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and 
haunting of the grave, is nothing else than 
naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself 
that he sees dead; those are his virtues that 
are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity 
him but the more, if pity be your cue; for 
where a man is all pride, vanity, and per- 
sonal aspiration, he goes through life un- 
shielded. In every part and corner of our life, 

134 



to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget one- 
self is to be happy; and this poor, laughable 
and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudi- 
ments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still 
ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and 
by his truant interests will leave that tortured 
body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then 
shall death appear before him in an altered 
guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to him- 
self, whether fate's crowning injustice or his 
own last vengeance upon those who fail to 
value him; but now as a power that wounds 
him far more tenderly, not without solemn 
compensations, taking and giving, bereaving 
and yet storing up. 

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs 
our own ignoble fallibility. When w^e have 
fallen through storey after storey of our 
vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among 
the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure 
the stature of our friends: how they stand be- 
tween us and our own contempt, believing 
in our best; how, linking us with others, and 
still spreading wide the influential circle, 
they weave us in and in with the fabric of 



135 



The Old 
Adam 



contemporary life; and to what pretty size 
they dwarf the virtues and the vices that ap- 
peared gigantic in our youth. So that at the 
last, when such a pin falls out — when there 
vanished in the least breath of time one of 
those rich magazines of life on which we drew 
our supply — when he who had first dawned 
upon us as a face among the faces of the city, 
and, still growing, came to bulk on our re- 
gard with those clear features of the loved 
and living man, falls in a breath to memory 
and shadow, there falls along with him a 
whole wing of the palace of our life. 

Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits. 

T"^ HERE is a certain critic, not indeed of 
-*- execution, but of matter, whom I dare 
be known to set before the best: a certain low- 
browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in 
the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller 
in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in 
cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to 
munch his berries — his wife, that accom- 
plished lady, squatting by his side: his name I 
never heard, but he is often described as Prob- 



136 



ably Arboreal, which may serve for recogni- 
tion. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but 
at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all 
our veins there run some minims of his old, 
wild, treetop blood; our civilized nerves still 
tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; 
and to that which would have moved our 
common ancestor all must obediently thrill. 
Memories and Portraits. Pastoral. 



YOU need repent none of your youthful 
vagaries. They may have been over the 
score on one side, just as those of age are 
probably over the score on the other. But 
they had a point; they not only befitted your 
age and expressed its attitude and passions, 
but they had a relation to what was outside 
of you, and implied criticism.s on the existing 
state of things, which you need not allow to 
have been undeserved, because you now see 
that they were partial. All error, not merely 
verbal, is a strong way of stating that the cur- 
rent truth is incomplete. The follies of youth 
have a basis in sound reason, just as much as 
the embarrassing questions put by babes and 

137 



It re- 
quires 
Brains 
to make 
a Fool of 
Yourself 



sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate 
the defects of our society. When the torrent 
sweeps the man against a boulder, you must 
expect him to scream, and you need not be 
surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. 
Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, 
discovered the cure of all evils in universal 
atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the in- 
justices of society, see nothing for it but 
the abolishment of everything and King- 
dom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young 
fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutiona- 
aries. But it is better to be a fool than to be 
dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape 
of a theory than to be entirely insensible to 
the jars and incongruities of life and take 
everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. 
Some people swallov^ the universe like a pill; 
they travel on through the world, like smiling 
images pushed from behind. For God's sake 
give me the young man who has brains 
enough to make a fool of himself! As for the 
others, the irony of facts shall take it out of 
their hands, and make fools of them in down- 
right earnest, ere the farce be over. There -^ 

^ 138 



shall be such a mopping and a mov/ing at the 
last day, and such blushing and confusion of 
countenance for all those who have been wise 
in their own esteem, and have not learnt the 
rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If 
we are indeed here to complete and perfect 
our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, 
and more sympathetic against some nobler 
career in the future, we had all best bestir 
ourselves to the utmost while we have the 
time. To equip a dull, respectable person 
with wings would be but to make a parody 
of an angel. Vtrginibus Puerisque. Crabbed 
Age and Touth. 



I 



T is a still more difficult consideration for 
our average men, that while all their 
teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin 
Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have in- 
culcated the same ideal of manners, caution, 
and respectability, those characters in history 
who have most notoriously flown in the face 
of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical 
terms of praise, and honoured with public 
monuments in the streets of our commercial 



139 



centres. This is very bewildering to the moral 
sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a 
humble but honest and reputable livelihood 
under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonel- 
ling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against 
the enemies of France; surely a melancholy 
example for one's daughters! And then you 
have Columbus, who may have pioneered 
America, but, when all is said, was a most 
imprudent navigator. His life is not the kind 
of thing one would like to put into the hands 
of young people; rather, one would do one's 
utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a 
red flag of adventure and disintegrating in- 
fluence in life. The time would fail me if I 
were to recite all the names in history whose 
exploits are perfectly irrational and even 
shocking to the business mind. The incon- 
gruity is speaking; and I imagine it must en- 
gender among the mediocrities a very peculiar 
attitude towards the nobler and showier sides 
of national life. They will read of the Charge 
of Balaklava in much the same spirit as they 
assist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. 
Persons of substance take in the Times and sit . 

j^ 



140 



composedly in the pit or boxes according to 
the degree of their prosperity in business. 
As for the generals who go galloping up and 
down among bombshells in absurd cocked 
hats — as for the actors who raddle their 
faces and demean themselves for hire upon 
the stage — they must belong, thank God! 
to a different order of beings, whom we watch 
as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, 
bottomless inane, or read about like charac- 
ters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. 
Our offspring would no more think of copy- 
ing their behaviour, let us hope, than of doff- 
ing their clothes and painting themselves 
blue in consequence of certain admissions in 
the first chapter of their school history of 
England. Virginibus Puerisque. Crabbed Age 
and Touth. 

HURRY is the resource of the faithless. 
Where a man can trust his own heart, 
and those of his friends, to-morrow is as good 
as to-day. And if he die in the meanwhile, 
why then, there he dies, and the question is 
solved. An Inland Voyage. 

141 



A GREAT many people run down jeal- 
ousy on the score that it is an artificial 
feeling, as well as practically inconvenient. 
This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which 
it merely attends, like an ill-humoured cour- 
tier, is itself artificial in exactly the same 
sense and to the same degree. I suppose what 
is meant by that objection is that jealousy 
has not always been a character of man; 
formed no part of that very modest kit of 
sentiments with which he is supposed to have 
begun the world; but waited to make its ap- 
pearance in better days and among richer 
natures. And this is equally true of love, and 
friendship, and love of country, and delight 
in what they call the beauties of nature, and 
most other things worth having. Love, in 
particular, will not endure any historical 
scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is 
one of the most incontestable facts in the 
world; but if you begin to ask what it was in 
other periods and countries, in Greece for 
instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring 
up, and everything seems so vague and 
changing that a dream is logical in compari- 



142 



son. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the con- 
sequences of love; you may like it or not, at 
pleasure; but there it is. 

Virginibus Pucrisque. III. 

WHEN people take the trouble to do dig- 
nified acts, it is worth while to take a 
little more, and allow the dignity to be com- 
mon to all concerned. But in our brave Saxon 
countries, where we plod threescore years 
and ten in the mud, and the wind keeps sing- 
ing in our ears from birth to burial, we do our 
good and bad with a high hand and almost 
offensively; and make even our alms a wit- 
ness-bearing and an act of war against the 
wrong. An Inland Voyage. 

IT is a commonplace, that we cannot answer 
for ourselves before we have been tried. 
But it is not so common a reflection, and 
surely more consoling, that we usually find 
ourselves a great deal braver and better than 
we thought. I believe this is every one's ex- 
perience; but an apprehension that they m^ay 
belie themselves in the future prevents 



143 



mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sen- 
timent abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would 
have saved me much trouble, that there had 
been some one to put me in a good heart about 
life when I was younger; to tell me how dan- 
gers are most portentous on a distant sight; 
and how the good in a man's spirit will not 
sufier itself to be overlaid, and rarely or never 
deserts him in the hour of need. But we are 
all for tootling on the sentimental flute in 
literature; and not a man among us will go 
to the head of the march to sound the heavy 
drums. An Inland Voyage. 



Individ- 
uality 



TO know what you prefer, instead of 
humbly saying Amen to what the world 
tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept 
your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; 
he may be honest in something more than the 
commercial sense; he may love his friends 
with an elective personal sympathy, and not 
accept them as an adjunct of the station to 
which he has been called. He may be a m.an, 
in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping 
in his own shape that God made him in; and 



144 



not a mere crank in the social engine house, 
welded on principles that he does not under- 
stand, and for purposes that he does not care 
for. An Inland Voyage. 

ALL the world may be an aristocrat, and 
play the duke among marquises, and the 
reigning monarch among the dukes. If he will 
only outvie them In tranquIlHty. An Imper- 
turbable demeanour comes from perfect pa- 
tience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or 
frightened, but go on In fortune or misfor- 
tune at their own private pace, like a clock 
during a thunderstorm. An Inland Voyage. 

IN this mixed world. If you can find one or 
two sensible places In a man, above all, If 
you should find a whole family living together 
on such pleasant terms, you may surely be 
satisfied, and take the rest for granted; or, 
what Is a great deal better, boldly make up 
your mind that you can do perfectly without 
the rest; and that ten thousand bad traits 
cannot make a single good one any the less 

An Inland Voyage. 



^ good 



145 



Grati- 
tude. 



The Self- 
made 
Man 



WHETHER people's gratitude for the 
good gifts that come to them be wisely 
conceived or dutifully expressed is a second- 
ary matter, after all, so long as they feel grat- 
itude. The true ignorance is when a man does 
not well know that he has received a good 
gift, or begins to imagine that he has got it 
for himself. The self-made man is the fun- 
niest wind-bag after all! There is a marked 
difference between decreeing light in chaos, 
and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back 
parlour with a box of patent matches; and do 
what we will, there is always something made 
to our hand, if it were only our fingers. 

An Inland Voyage. 



Saying 
"No," 
and 
"Yes" 



IT is a useful accomplishment to be able to 
say no, but surely it is the essence of amia- 
bility to prefer to say yes where it is possible. 
There is something wanting in the man who 
does not hate himself whenever he is con- 
strained to say no. Familiar Studies of Men 
and Books. Henry David Thoreau. 



146 



RELIGION 



IT was Sabbath; the mountain-fields were 
all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came 
down through St. Martin de Frugeres, the 
church was crowded to the door, there were 
people kneeling without upon the steps, and 
the sound of the priest's chanting came forth 
out of the dim interior. It gave me a home 
feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman 
of the Sabbath, so to speak, and all Sabbath 
observances, like a Scotch accent, strike in 
me mixed feelings, grateful and the reverse. 
It is only a traveller, hurrying by like a per- 
son from another planet, who can rightly 
enjoy the peace and beauty of the great as- 
cetic feast. The sight of the resting country 
does his spirit good. There is something better 
than music in the wide, unusual silence; and 
it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the 
sound of a little river or the warmth of sun- 
light. Travels with a Donkey. 



I 



T is a bad idea for a man to change," said 
one. It may have been accidental, but 
you see how this phrase pursued me; and for 
myself, I believe it is the current philosophy 



149 



in these parts. I have some difficulty in imag- 
ining a better. It's not only a great flight of 
confidence for a man to change his creed and 
go out of his family for heaven's sake; but the 
odds are — nay, and the hope is — that, with 
all this great transition in the eyes of man, he 
has not changed himself a hairsbreadth to the 
eyes of God. Honour to those w^ho do so, for 
the wrench is sore. But it argues something 
narrow, whether of strength or weakness, 
whether of the prophet or the fool, in those 
who can take a sufficient interest in such in- 
finitesimal and human operations, or who 
can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of 
the mind. And I think I should not leave my 
old creed for another, changing only words 
for other words; but by some brave reading, 
embrace it in spirit and truth, and find wrong 
as wrong for me as for the best of other com- 
munions. Travels with a Donkey. 

THE world in which we live has been va- 
riously said and sung by the most in- 
genious poets and philosophers: these reduc- 
ing it to formulae and chemical ingredients. 



150 



those striking the lyre in high-sounding meas- 
ures for the handiwork of God. What expe- 
rience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and the 
choosing mind has much to reject before it 
can get together the materials of a theory. 
Dew and thunder, destroying Atilla and the 
Spring lambkins, belong to an order of con- 
trast which no repetition can assimilate. There 
is an uncouth, outlandish strain throughout 
the web of the world, as from a vexatious 
planet in the house of life. Things are not 
congruous and wear strange disguises: the 
consummate flower is fostered out of dung, 
and after nourishing itself awhile with heav- 
en's delicate distillations, decays again into 
indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's 
ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt 
pies and filthily besmear their countenance. 
Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when 
tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is 
found to issue from the most portentous 
nightmare of the universe — the great, con- 
flagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumul- 
tuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun 
litself is enough to disgust a human being of 



151 



the scene which he inhabits; and you would 
not fancy there was a green or habitable spot 
in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet 
it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to 
which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that 
we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic 
tea-parties at the arbour door. 
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, 
now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies 
were dispersed; now by the woodside on a 
summer noon trolling on his pipe until he 
charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. 
And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the 
last word of human experience. To certain 
smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and 
elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or 
that other spectacled professor, tell a speaking 
story; but for youth and all ductile and con- 
genial minds. Pan is not dead, but of all the 
classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; 
goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, 
the type of the shaggy world: and in every 
wood, if you go with a spirit properly pre- 
pared, you shall hear the note of his pipe. 
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with 



152 



gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea re- 
ceives clear rivers running from among reeds 
and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic w^orld; 
sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds 
sing among the trees in pairing-time ? What 
means the sound of the rain falling far and 
wide upon the leafy forest ? To what tune 
does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his 
net at morning, and the bright fish are heaped 
inside the boat ? These are all airs upon Pan's 
pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the 
exultation of his heart, and gleefully modu- 
lated their outflow with his lips and fingers. 
The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the 
dells with laughter and striking out high 
echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet 
in the lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom 
floor; the hooves of many horses, beating the 
wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying 
rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles 
and the live touch of hands; and the voice of 
things, and their significant look, and the 
renovating influence they breathed forth — 
these are his joyful measures, to which the 
whole earth treads in choral harmony. To 



this music the young lambs bound as to a 
tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely 
in the dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in 
all hearts; and to look on the happy side of 
nature is common, in their hours, to all created 
things. Some are vocal under a good influence, 
are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and 
hand on their happiness to others, as a child 
who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. 
Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, and 
make a halting figure in the universal dance. 
And some, like sour spectators at the play, re- 
ceive the music into their hearts with an un- 
moved countenance, and walk like strangers 
through the general rejoicing. But let him 
feign never so carefully, there is not a man 
but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out 
a stave of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing. 
Alas, if that were all! But oftentimes the air is 
changed: and in the screech of the night wind, 
chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and 
the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random 
deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, 
we recognize the "dread foundation" of life 
and the anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages 



154 



open war against her children, and under her 
softest touch hides treacherous claws. The 
cool waters invite us in to drown; the domestic 
hearth burns us in the hour of sleep, and 
makes an end of all. Everything is good or 
bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its 
circumstances. For a few bright days in Eng- 
land the hurricane must break forth and the 
North Sea pay a toll of populous ships. And 
when the universal music has led lovers into 
the paths of dalliance, confident of Nature's 
sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, 
and death makes a clutch from his ambus- 
cade below the bed of marriage. For death is 
given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are 
fatal; and into this life, where one life preys 
into another, the child too often makes its 
entrance from the mother's corpse. It is no 
wonder, with so traitorous a scheme of things, 
if the wise people who created for us the idea 
of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him 
was the most terrible, since it embraces all. 
And still we preserve the phrase: a panic ter- 
ror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to 
hearken too intently for the threat that runs 

155 



through all the winning music of the world, 
to hold back the hand from the rose because 
of the thorn, and from life because of death: 
this is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable 
citizens who flee life's pleasures and respon- 
sibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the 
midway of custom, avoiding the right hand 
and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, 
how surprised they would be if they could 
hear their attitude mythologically expressed, 
and knew themselves as tooth-chattering 
ones, who flee from Nature because they fear 
the hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound 
Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly 
concealed in the bank parlour! For to dis- 
trust one's impulses is to be recreant to Pan. 
There are moments when the mind refuses 
to be satisfied with evolution, and demands 
a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's 
experience. Sometimes the mood is brought 
about by laughter at the humorous side of 
life, as when, abstracting ourselves from 
earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, 
or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the 
planet all the while whirling in the opposite 
_ 



direction, so that, for all their hurry, they 
travel back-foremost through the universe of 
space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of de- 
light, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. 
At least, there will always be hours when we 
refuse to be put off by the feint of explana- 
tion, nicknamed science; and demand instead 
some palpitating image of our estate, that 
shall represent the troubled and uncertain 
element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason 
by the means of art. Science writes of the 
world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; 
it is all true; but what is it when compared 
with the reality of which it discourses .? where 
hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, 
and hills totter in the earthquake, and there 
is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and 
a thrill in all noises of the ear, and Romance 
herself has made her dwelling among men .? 
So we come back to the old myth, and hear 
the goat-footed piper making the music which 
is itself the charm and terror of things; and 
when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, 
fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gra- 
cious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the 



157 



Our 

Divine 
Unrest 



thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he 
has stamped his hoof in the night thicket. 

Virginibus Puerisque. Pan s Pipes. 

WE are told by men of science that all 
the ventures of mariners on the sea, all 
that counter-marching of tribes and races 
that confounds old history v^ith its dust and 
rumour, sprung from nothing more abstruse 
than the laws of supply and demand, and a 
certain natural instinct for cheap rations. To 
any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull 
and pitiful explanation. The tribes that came 
swarming out of the North and East, if they 
were indeed pressed onward from behind by 
others, were drawn at the same time by the 
magnetic influence of the South and West. 
The fame of other lands had reached them; 
the name of the eternal city rang in their ears; 
they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they 
travelled toward wine and gold and sunshine, 
but their hearts were set on something higher. 
That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble 
of humanity that makes all high achievements 
and all miserable failure, the same that 



158 



spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent 
Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, in- 
spired and supported these barbarians on 
their perilous march. There is one legend 
which profoundly represents their spirit, of 
how a flying party of these wanderers en- 
countered a very old man shod with iron. 
The old man asked them whither they were 
going; and they answered, with one voice: 
"To the Eternal City!" He looked at them 
gravely. "I have sought it," he said, "over 
the most part of the world. Three such pairs 
as I now carry on my feet have I worn out 
upon this pilgrimage, and now the fourth is 
growing slender underneath my steps. And 
all this while I have not found the city." And 
he turned and went his own way alone, leav- 
ing them astonished. The Merry Men. 

A GENEROUS prayer is never presented 
in vain; the petitioner is always, I be- 
lieve, rewarded by some gracious visitation. 

The Merry Men. 



159 



ART 



BUT the gymnast is not my favourite; he 
has little or no tincture of the artist in his 
composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, 
for the most part, since his profession makes 
no call upon it, and does not accustom him 
to high ideas. But if a man is only so much 
of an actor that he can stumble through a 
farce, he is made free of a new order of 
thoughts. He has something else to think 
about besides the money box. He has a pride 
of his own, and, what is of far more impor- 
tance, he has an aim before him that he can 
never quite attain. He has gone upon a pil- 
grimage that will last him his life long, be- 
cause there is no end to it short of perfection. 
He will better upon himself a little day by 
day; or even if he has given up the attempt, 
he will always remember that once upon a 
time he had conceived this high ideal, that 
once upon a time he had fallen in love with a 
star. "'Tis better to have loved and lost." 
Although the moon should have nothing to 
say to Endymion, although he should settle 
down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not 
think he would move with a better grace, and 



163 



cherish hifrher thouo-hts to the end ? The 
louts he meets at church never had a fancy 
above Audrey's snood; but there is a reminis- 
cence in Endymion's heart that, Hke a spice, 
keeps it fresh and haughty. To be even one 
of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp 
on a man's countenance. I remember once 
dining with a party in the inn Chateau Lan- 
don. Most of them were unmistakable bag- 
men; others well-to-do peasantry; but there 
was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face 
stood out from among the rest surprisingly. 
It looked more finished; more of the spirit 
looked out through it; it had a living, ex- 
pressive air, and you could see that his eyes 
took things in. My companion and I won- 
dered greatly who and what he could be. It 
was fair time in Chateau Landon, and when 
we went to the booths, we had our question 
answered; for there was our friend busily 
fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He was 
a wandering violinist. An Inland Voyage. 



style 
in Art 



TYLE is the invariable mark of any mas- 
ter; and for the student who does not aspire 



164 



so high as to be numbered with the giants, it 
is still the one quaHty in which he may im- 
prove himself at will. Passion, wisdom, crea- 
tive force, the power of mystery or colour, are 
allotted in the hour of birth, and can be nei- 
ther learned nor stimulated. But the just and 
dexterous use of what qualities we have, the 
proportion of one part to another and to the 
whole, the elision of the useless, the accentua- 
tion of the important, and the preservation of 
a uniform character from end to end — these, 
which taken together constitute technical 
perfection, are to some degree within the 
reach of industry and intellectual courage. 
What to put in and what to leave out; whether 
some particular fact be organically necessary 
or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely 
ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure 
the general design; and finally, whether, if we 
decide to use it, we should do so grossly and 
notably, or in some conventional disguise: 
are questions of plastic style continually re- 
arising. And the sphinx that patrols the high- 
ways of executive art has no more unanswer- 
able riddle to propound. A Note on Realism. 
_ 



Cathe- 
drals 



I FIND I never weary of great churches. It 
is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. 
Mankind W2.s never so happily inspired as 
v^hen it made a cathedral; a thing as single 
and specious as a statue to the first glance, 
and yet, on examination, as lively and inter- 
esting as a forest in detail. The height of 
spires cannot be taken by trigonometry; they 
measure absurdly short, but how^ tall they are 
to the admiring eye! And where we have so 
many elegant proportions, growing one out 
of the other, and all together into one, it 
seems as if proportion transcended itself and 
became something different and more im- 
posing. I could never fathom how a man dares 
to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. 
What is he to say that will not be an anti- 
climax .f* For though I have heard a consider- 
able variety of sermons, I never yet heard 
one that was so expressive as a cathedral. 
'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches 
day and night; not only telling you of man's 
arts and aspirations in the past, but convinc- 
ing your own soul of ardent sympathies; or 
rather, like all good preachers, it sets you 



preaching to yourself; — and every man is 
his own doctor of divinity in the last resort. 

An Inland Voyage. 

THE art of literature stands apart from 
among its sisters, because the material 
in which the literary artist works is the dialect 
of life: hence, on the one hand, a strange fresh- 
ness and immediacy of address to the public 
mind which is ready prepared to understand 
it; but hence, on the other, a singular limita- 
tion. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic 
and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; 
literature alone is condemned to work in 
mosaic with infinite and quite rigid words. 
You have seen those blocks, dear to the nur- 
sery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a 
third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of 
just such arbitrary size and figure that the 
literary architect is condemned to design the 
palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since 
these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged 
currency of our daily affairs, there are here 
possible none of those suppressions by which 
other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigor: 

167 



no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, 
no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no 
blank wall, as in architecture: but every 
word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must 
move in a logical progression, and convey a 
definite conventional import. 
Now the first merit which attracts in the 
pages of a good writer, or the talk of a bril- 
liant conversationalist, is the apt choice and 
contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, 
a strange art to take these blocks, rudely con- 
ceived for the purpose of the market or the 
bar, and by tact of application touch them to 
the finest meanings and distinctions, restore 
to them their primal energy, wittily shift 
them to another issue, or make of them a 
drum to rouse the passions. But though this 
form of merit is without doubt the most sen- 
sible and seizing, it is far from being equally 
present in all writers. The effect of words in 
Shakespeare, their singular justice, signifi- 
cance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, 
from the effect of words in Addison or Field- 
ing. Or, to take an example nearer home, the 
words in Carlyle seem electrified into an 



i68 



energy of lineament, like the faces of men 
furiously moved; whilst the words in Ma- 
caulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, 
harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from 
the memory like undistinguishable elements 
in a general effect. But the first class of writ- 
ers have no monopoly of literary merit. There 
is a sense in which Addison is superior to 
Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than 
Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: 
it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it 
lies not in the interest or value of the matter; 
it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry or of 
humour. The first three are but infants to the 
three second; and yet each, in a particular 
point of literary art, excels his superior in 
the whole. What is that point ? 

Style tn Literature. 



i6g 



LITERATURE 



I COME next to Whitman's ** Leaves of 
Grass," a book of singular service, a book 
which tumbled the world upside down for 
me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of 
genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus 
shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back 
again upon a strong foundation of all the 
original and manly virtues. But it is, once 
more, only a book for those who have the gift 
of reading. I will be very frank — I believe it 
is so with all good books, except, perhaps, 
fiction. The average man lives, and must 
live, so wholly in convention, that gun-pow- 
der charges of the truth are more apt to dis- 
compose than to invigorate his creed. Either 
he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, 
and crouches the closer round that little idol 
of part truths and part conveniences which 
is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced 
by what is new, forgets what is old, and be- 
comes truly blasphemous and indecent him- 
self. New truth is only useful to supplement 
the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, 
not to destroy, our civil and often elegant 
conventions. He who cannot judge had better 



X73 



stick to fiction and the daily papers. There 
he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, 
some good. The Influence of Books. 



Mere- 
dith's 
"The 
Egoist ' 



I SHOULD never forgive myself if I forgot 
"The Egoist." It is art, if you like, but it 
belongs purely to didactic art, and from all 
the novels I have read (and I have read thou- 
sands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a 
Nathan for the modern David; here is a book 
to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, 
the angry picture of men's faults, is not great 
art; v^e can all be angry with our neighbour; 
what we want is to be shown, not his defects, 
of which we are too conscious, but his merits, 
to which we are too blind. And "The Egoist" 
is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is 
a satire of singular quality, which tells you 
nothing of that obvious mote, which is en- 
gaged from first to last with that invisible 
beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; 
these are your own faults that are dragged 
into the day and numbered, with lingering 
relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A 
young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the 



174 



story) came to him in an agony. "That is too 
bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is me!" 
"No, my dear fellow," said the author; "he 
is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five 
or six times myself, and I mean to read it 
again; for I am like the young friend of. the 
anecdote — I think Willoughby an unmanly 
but a very serviceable exposure of myself. 

The Influence of Books. 

WORDSWORTH should perhaps come 
next. Everyone has been influenced by 
Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely 
how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity 
of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that is 
in the lonely hills," something of the cold 
thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a 
particular address to what is best in us. I do 
not know that you learn a lesson; you need 
not — Mill did not — agree with any one of 
his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are 
the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a 
new error — the old one was perhaps as good; 
but a spirit communicated is a perpetual pos- 
session. These best teachers climb beyond 



175 



Plays 
and Ro- 
mances 



The Play 



teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, 
and what is best in themselves, that they com- 
municate. The Influence of Books. 

THE purposes of these two arts are so 
much alike, and they deal so much with 
the same passions and interests, that we are apt 
to forget the fundamental opposition of their 
methods. And yet such a fundamental oppo- 
sition exists. In the drama the action is de- 
veloped in great measure by means of things 
that remain outside of the art; by means of 
real things, that is, and not artistic conven- 
tions for things. This is a sort of realism that 
is not to be confounded with that realism in 
painting of which we hear so much. The 
realism in painting is a thing of purposes; 
this that we have to indicate in the drama is 
an affair of method. We have heard a story, 
indeed, of a painter in France who, when he 
wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried realism 
from his ends to his means, and plastered 
real sand upon his canvas; and that is pre- 
cisely what is done in the drama. The dra- 
matic author has to paint his beaches with 

176 



real sand; real live men and women move 
about the stage; we hear real voices; what is 
feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; 
we do actually see a woman go behind a 
screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain 
interval, we do actually see her very shame- 
fully produced again. Now all these things, 
that remain as they were in life, and are not 
transmuted into any artistic convention, are 
terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; 
and hence there are for the dramatist many 
resultant limitations in time and space. These 
limitations in some sort approximate towards 
those of painting; the dramatic author is tied 
down, not indeed to a moment, but to the 
duration of each scene or act; he is confined 
to the stage, almost as the painter is confined 
within his frame. But the great restriction 
is this, that a dramatic author must deal with 
his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain 
moments of suspense, certain significant dis- 
positions of personages, a certain logical 
growth of emotion, these are the only means 
at the disposal of the playwright. It is true 
that, with the assistance of the scene-painter. 



177 



The Ro- 
mance 



the costumier and the conductor of the or- 
chestra, he may add to this something of 
pageant, something of sound and fury; but 
these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the 
mark, and do not come under the vivifying 
touch of his genius. When we turn to romance 
we find this no longer. Here nothing is re- 
produced to our senses directly. Not only 
the main conception of the work, but the 
scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by 
which this conception is brought home to 
us, have been put through the crucible of 
another man's mind, and come out again, 
one and all, in the form of written words. 
With the loss of every degree of such realism 
as we have described, there is for art a clear 
gain of liberty and largeness of competence. 
Thus, painting, in which the round outlines 
of things are thrown on to a flat board, is far 
more free than sculpture, in which their 
solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these 
identities that art gains true strength. And 
so in the case of novels as compared with the 
stage. Continuous narration is the flat board 
on which the novelist throws everything. 



178 



And from this there results for him a great loss 
of vividness, but a great compensating gain 
in his pov^er over the subject; so that he can 
nov^ subordinate one thing to another in im- 
portance, and introduce all manner of very 
subtle detail, to a degree that was before im- 
possible. He can render just as easily the 
flourish of trumpets before a victorious em- 
peror and the gossip of country market 
women; the gradual decay of forty years of 
a man's life and the gesture of a passionate 
moment. He finds himself equally unable, 
if he looks at it from one point of view — 
equally able, if he looks at it from another 
point of view — to reproduce a colour, a 
sound, an outline, a logical argument, a 
physical action. He can show his readers, 
behind and around the personages that for 
the moment occupy the foreground of his 
story, the continual suggestion of the land- 
scape; the turn of the weather, that will turn 
with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly fore- 
shadowed on the horizon; the fatality of dis- 
tant events, the stream of national tendency, 
the salient framework of causation. And all 



179 



Marcus 
Aurelius 



this thrown upon the flat board — all this 
entering, naturally and smoothly, into the 
texture of continuous intelligent narration. 

Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Victor 
Hugo's Romance. 

THIS brings us by a natural transition to 
a very noble book — the Meditations of 
Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, 
the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness 
of others, that are there expressed and were 
practised on so great a scale in the life of its 
writer, make this book a book quite by itself. 
No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it 
scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings — 
those very mobile, those not very trusty parts 
of man. Its address lies further back: its 
lesson comes more deeply home; when you 
have read, you carry away with you a mem- 
ory of the man himself; it is as though you had 
touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, 
and made a noble friend; there is another 
bond on you thenceforward, binding you to 
life and to the love of virtue. 

The Influence of Books. 

i8o 



WE are accustomed nowadays to a great 
deal of puling over the circumstances 
in which we are placed. The great refinement 
of many poetical gentlemen has here rendered 
them practically unfit for the jostling and 
ugliness of life, and they record their unfit- 
ness at considerable length. The bold and 
awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too 
many flimsy imitators; for there is always 
something consolatory in grandeur; but the 
symphony transposed for the piano becomes 
hysterically sad. The literature of woe, as 
Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we 
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a 
most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. 
Young gentlemen with three or four hundred 
a year of private means look down from a 
pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown 
and hearty men who have dared to say a 
good word for life since the beginning of the 
world. There is no prophet but the melan- 
choly Jacques, and the blue devils dance on 
all our literary wives. 

It would be a poor service to spread culture, 
if this be its result, among the comparatively 



Igno- 
rance is 
Better 

than 
that 
Knowl- 
edge 
which 
brings 
Sadness. 



innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When 
our Httle poets have to be sent to look at the 
ploughmen and learn wisdom, we must be 
careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. 
Where a man in not the best of circumstances 
preserves composure of mind, and relishes 
ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, 
in the intervals of dull and unremunerative 
labour; where a man in this predicament can 
afford a lesson by the way to what are called 
his intellectual superiors, there is plainly 
something to be lost, as well as something to 
be gained, by teaching him to think differ- 
ently. It is better to leave him as he is than to 
teach him whining. It is better that he should 
go without the cheerful lights of culture, if 
cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimental- 
ism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all 
means, fight against the hide-bound stolidity 
of sensation and sluggishness of mind which 
blurs and decolourises for poor natures the 
wonderful pageant of consciousness; let us 
teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, 
and they will learn for themselves to sym- 
pathise; but let us see to it, above all, that t 

182 



we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious 
note, and build the man up in courage, w^hile 
we demolish its substitute, indifference. Fa- 
miliar Studies of Men and Books. Walt Whit- 
man. 



AND the young writer will not so much be 
helped by genial pictures of what an art 
may aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea 
of what it must be on the lowest terms. The 
best that we can say to him is this: Let him 
choose a motive, whether of character or 
passion; carefully construct his plot so that 
every incident is an illustration of the motive, 
and every property employed shall bear to it a 
near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid 
a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakes- 
peare, the sub-plot be a reversion or comple- 
ment of the main intrigue; 'suffer not his style 
to flag below the level of the argument; pitch 
the key of conversation, not with any thought 
of how men talk in parlours, but with a single 
eye to the degree of passion he may be called 
on to express; and allow neither himself in 
the narrative, nor any character in the course 

i8^ 



of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is 
not part a nd parcel ot the business of the sto ry 
or the discussi on of the problem involved. 
Let him not regret it this shortens his books; 
it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter 
is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not 
mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that 
he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he 
has chosen. Let him not care particularly if 
he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent 
material detail of the day's manners, the re- 
production of the atmosphere and the en- 
vironment. These elements are not essential: 
a novel may be excellent, and yet have none 
of them; a passion or a character is so much 
the better depicted as it rises clearer from 
material circumstances. In this age of the par- 
ticular, let him remember the ages of the ab- 
stract, the great books of the past, the great 
men that lived before Shakespeare and before 
Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, 
let him bear in mind that his novel is not a 
transcript of life, to be judged by its exacti- 
tude; but a simplification of some side or 
point of life, to stand or fall by its significant^ 

184 



simplicity. For although, in great men, work- 
ing upon great motives, what we observe and 
admire is often their complexity, yet under- 
neath appearances the truth remains un- 
changed : that simplification was their method, 
and that simplicity is their excellence. Memo- 
ries and Portraits. A Humhle Remonstrance. 

NOW, this is one of the natural appetites 
with which any lively literature has to 
count. The desire for knowledge, I had al- 
most added the desire for meat, is not more 
deeply seated that this demand for fit and 
striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, 
or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest 
of children uses invention in his play; and 
even as the imaginative grown person, join- 
ing in the game, at once enriches it with many 
delightful circumstances, the great creative 
writer shows us the realisation and the apoth- 
eosis of the day-dreams of common men. His 
stories may be nourished with the realities of 
life, but their true mark is to satisfy the name- 
less longings of the reader, and to obey the 
/deal laws of the day-dream. The right kind 



185 



of thing should fall out in the right kind of 
place; the right kind of thing should follow; 
and not only the characters talk aptly and 
think naturally, but all the circumstances in a 
tale answer one to another like notes in music. 
The threads of a story come from time to 
time together and make a picture in the web; 
the characters fall from time to time into 
some attitude to each other or to nature, 
which stamps the story home like an illustra- 
tion. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, 
Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, 
Ulysses bending the great bow. Christian 
running with his fingers in his ears, these are 
each culminating moments in the legend, and 
each has been printed on the mind's eye for 
ever. Other things we may forget; we may 
forget the words, although they are beautiful; 
we may forget the author's comment, al- 
though perhaps it was ingenious and true; 
but these epoch-making scenes, which put the 
last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at 
one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleas- 
ures, we so adopt into the very bosom of our 
mind that neither time nor tide can efface o^ 
_ 



\- 



weaken the impression. This, then, is the 
plastic part of Hterature: to embody charac- 
ter, thought, or emotion in some act or atti- 
tude that shall be remarkably striking to the 
mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest 
thing to do in words; the thing which, once 
accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy 
and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the 
quality of epics. Compared with this, all 
other purposes in literature, except the purely 
lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard 
in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in 
result. It is one thing to write about the inn 
at Burford, or to describe scenery with the 
word-painters; it is quite another to seize on 
the heart of the suggestion and make a coun- 
try famous with a legend. It is one thing to 
remark and to dissect, with the most cutting 
logic, the complications of life, and of the 
human spirit; it is quite another to give them 
body and blood in the story of Ajax or of 
Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second 
is something besides, for it is likewise art. 
Memories and Portraits. A Gossip on Ro- 



mance. 



The 
Quality 
of Ro- 
mance 



TO come at all at the nature of this quality 
of romance, we must bear in mind the 
peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art 
produces illusion; in the theatre we never 
forget that we are in the theatre; and while 
we read a story, we sit wavering between two 
minds, now merely clapping our hands at the 
merit of the performance, now condescending 
to take an active part in fancy with the char- 
acters. This last is the triumph of romantic 
story-telling; when the reader consciously 
plays at being the hero, the scene is a good 
scene. Now in character-studies the pleasure 
that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, 
we smile at incongruities, we are moved to 
sudden heats of sympathy with courage, 
suffering or virtue. But the characters are 
still themselves, they are not us; the more 
clearly they are depicted, the more widely do 
they stand away from us, the more imperi- 
ously do they thrust us back into our place 
as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with 
Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Ras- 
tignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in 
common with them. It is not character bus 
_ 



incident that woos us out of reserve. Some- 
thing happens as we desire to have it happen 
to ourselves: some situation, that v^e have 
long dallied w^ith in fancy, is realised in the 
story v^ith enticing and appropriate details. 
Then we forget the characters; then we push 
the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale 
in our own person and bathe in fresh expe- 
rience; — and then, and then only, do we say 
we have been reading a romance. It is not 
only pleasurable things that we imagine in 
our day-dreams; there are lights in which we 
are willing to contemplate even the idea of 
our own death; ways in which it seems as if 
it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, 
or calumniated. It is thus possible to con- 
struct a story, even of tragic import, in which 
every incident, detail and trick of circum- 
stance shall be welcome to the reader's 
thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what 
play is to the child; it is there that he changes 
the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and 
when the game so chimes with his fancy that 
he can join in it with all his heart, when it 
pleases him with every turn, when he loves 



to recall it and dwells upon its recollections 
with entire delight, fiction is called romance. 
Memories and Portraits. A Gossip on Ro- 
mance. 



Books 

are 

Letters 

to the 

Author's 

Friends 



EVERY book is, in an intimate sense, a 
circular letter to the friends of him who 
writes it. They alone take his meaning; they 
find private messages, assurances of love, 
and expressions of gratitude, dropped for 
them in every corner. The public is but a 
generous patron who defrays the postage. 
Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have 
an old and kindly custom of addressing it on 
the outside to one. Of what shall a man be 
proud, if he is not proud of his friends ? 

Travels with a Donkey. 



Dumas's 

D'Ar- 

tagnan 



TO cling to what is left of any damaged 
quality is virtue in the man; but per- 
haps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called 
morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, it 
is in the character of d'Artagnan, that we 
must look for that spirit of morality which is 
one of the chief merits of the book, makes one 



190 



of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it 
high above more popular rivals. Athos, with 
the coming of years, has declined too much 
into the preacher, and the preacher of a sap- 
less creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed in- 
to a man so witty, rough, kind, and upright, 
that he takes the heart by storm. There is 
nothing of the copy-book about his virtues, 
nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, 
natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he 
is no district visitor — no Wesley or Robes- 
pierre; his conscience is void of all refinement 
whether for good or evil; but the whole man 
rings true like a good sovereign. Readers who 
have approached the Vicomte, not across the 
country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed 
avenue of the Mousquetaires and Vingt Ans 
Apres, will not have forgotten d'Artagnan's 
ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable 
trick upon Milady. What a pleasure it is, 
then, what a reward, how agreeable a lesson, 
to see the old captain humble himself to the 
son of the man whom he has personated! 
Here, and throughout, if I am to choose vir- 
tues for myself and my friends, let me choose 

191 



The 

Truth in 
Litera- 
ture is 
Essen- 
tial 



the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say there is 
no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I 
do say there is none that I love so wholly. 
There are many spiritual eyes that seem to 
spy upon our actions — eyes of the dead and 
the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in 
our most private hours, and whom we fear 
and scruple to offend: our witnesses and 
judges. And among these, even if you should 
think me childish, I must count my d'Artagn- 
an — not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom 
Thackeray pretended to prefer — a prefer- 
ence, I take the freedom of saying, in which 
he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh 
and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not 
Nature's but Dumas's. And this is the par- 
ticular crown and triumph of the artist — not 
to be true merely, but to be lovable; not sim- 
ply to convince, but to enchant. 
Memories and Portraits. A Novel of Dumas's. 

j\/l AN is imperfect; yet, in his literature, 

he must express himself and his own 

views and preferences; for to do anything 

else is to do a far more perilous thing than to 



ig2 



risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being 
untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, 
is to travesty a sentiment; that w^ill not be 
helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are 
sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. 
There is probably no point of view possible 
to a sane man but contains some truth and, 
in the true connection, might be profitable to 
the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any 
one could tell it to me, but I am afraid of parts 
of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to 
dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well 
as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as 
to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to 
combine all these extremes into his work, 
each in its place and proportion, that work 
would be the world's masterpiece of morality 
as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for 
any book is wrong that gives a misleading 
picture of the world and life. The trouble is 
that the weakling must be partial; the work 
of one proving dank and depressing; of an- 
other, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilepti- 
cally sensual ; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In 
literature as in conduct, you can never hope 

193 



The 
Duties 
of the 
Writer 
as Story- 
teller 



to do exactly right. All you can do is to make 
as sure as possible; and for that there is but 
one rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry 
that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a 
book and put it by for nine or even ninety 
years; for in the writing you will have partly 
convinced yourself; the delay must precede 
any beginning; and if you meditate any work 
of art, you should first long roll the subject 
under the tongue to make sure you like the 
flavour, before you brew a volume that shall 
taste of it from end to end: or if you propose 
to enter on the field of controversy, you should 
first have thought upon the question under 
all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, 
in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this nearness 
of examination necessary for any true and 
kind writing, that makes the practice of art a 
prolonged and noble education for the writer. 
Profession of Letters. 

SO far as the writer merely narrates, he 
should principally tell of these. He should 
tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful 
elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly 4 



194 



of the evil and sorrow of the present, to move 
us w^ith instances; he should tell of wise and 
good people in the past, to excite us by ex- 
ample; and of these he should tell soberly 
and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we 
may neither grow discouraged with ourselves 
nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body 
of contemporary literature, ephemeral and 
feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men 
the springs of thought and kindness, and 
supports them (for those who will go at all 
are easily supported) on their way to what is 
true and right. And if, in any degree, it does 
so now, how much more might it do so if the 
writers chose! There is not a life in all the 
records of the past but, properly studied, 
might lend a hint and a help to some con- 
temporary. There is not a juncture in to-day's 
affairs but some useful word may yet be said 
of it. Even the reporter has an office, and, 
with clear eyes and honest language, may 
unveil injustices and point the way to progress. 
And for a last word: in all narration there is 
only one way to be clever, and that is to be 
exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality 



195 



which must presuppose the first; for vividly 
to convey a w^rong impression is only to make 
failure conspicuous. 

But a fact may be viewed on many sides: it 
may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, 
indifference, or admiration, and by each of 
these the story will be transformed to some- 
thing else. The newspapers that told of the 
return of our representatives from Berlin, 
even if they had not differed as to the facts, 
would have sufficiently differed by their 
spirits; so that the one description would have 
been a second ovation, and the other a pro- 
longed insult. The subject makes but a trifling 
part of any piece of literature, and the view 
of the writer is itself a fact more important 
because less disputable than the others. Now 
this spirit in which a subject is regarded, im- 
portant in all kinds of literary work, becomes 
all-important in works of fiction, meditation, 
or rhapsody; for there it not only colours but 
itself chooses the facts; not only modifies but 
shapes the work. And thence, over the far 
larger proportion of the field of literature, 
the health or disease of the writer's mind or 



ig6 



momentary humour forms not only the lead- 
ing feature of his work, but is, at bottom, 
the only thing he can communicate to others. 
In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first 
of all the author's attitude that is narrated, 
though in the attitude there be implied a 
whole experience and a theory of life. An 
author who has begged the question and re- 
poses in some narrow faith cannot, if he 
would; express the whole or even many of 
the sides of this various existence; for, his 
own life being maim, some of them are not 
admitted in his theory, and were only dimly 
and unwillingly recognised in his experience. 
Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the 
inhumanity in works of merely sectarian re- 
ligion; and hence we find equal although un- 
similar limitation in works inspired by the 
spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for 
high society. So that the first duty of any man 
who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or 
not, he has so far set himself up for a leader 
of the minds of men; and he must see that his 
own mind is kept supple, charitable, and 
bright. Everything but prejudice should find 



197 



a voice through him; he should see the good 
in all things; where he has even a fear that 
he does not v^holly understand, there he 
should be wholly silent; and he should recog- 
nise from the first that he has only one tool 
in his workshop, that tool is sympathy. 

Profession of Letters. 



198 



NATURE 



/\ FTER a good woman, and a good book, 

and tobacco, there is nothing so agreeable 

on earth as a river. An Inland Voyage. 

I WISH our way had always lain among 
woods. Trees are the most civil society. 
An old oak that has been growing where he 
stands since before the Reformation, taller 
than many spires, more stately than the 
greater part of mountains, and yet a living 
thing, liable to sickness and death, like you 
and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson 
in history ? But acres on acres of such pa- 
triarchs contiguously rooted, their green tops 
billowing in the wind, their stalwart young- 
lings pushing up about their knees; a whole 
forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour 
to the light, giving perfume to the air: what 
is this but the most imposing field of nature's 
repertory t Heine wished to lie like Merlin 
under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not 
be satisfied with one tree; but if the wood 
grew together like a banyan grove, I would 
be buried under the tap-root of the whole; 
my parts should circulate from oak to oak; 



201 



and my consciousness should be diffused 
abroad in all the forest, and give a common 
heart to that assembly of green spires, so that 
it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and 
dignity. I think I feel a thousand squirrels 
leaping from bough to bough in my vast 
mausoleum; and the birds and the winds 
merrily coursing over its uneven, leafy sur- 
face. An Inland Voyage. 



Forest 

and 

Ocean 



WHAT is a forest but a city of nature's 
own, full of hardy and innocuous living 
things, where there is nothing dead and noth- 
ing made with the hands, but the citizens 
themselves are the houses and public monu- 
ments ? . . . And surely of all smells in the 
world, the smell of many trees is the sweetest 
and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pis- 
tolling sort of odour, that takes you in the 
nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a fine 
sentiment of open water and tall ships; but 
the smell of a forest, which comes nearest to 
this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many 
degrees in the quality of softness. Again, the 
smell of the sea has little variety, but the' 



'smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it 
varies with the hour of the day, not in strength 
merely, but in character; and the different 
sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of the 
wood to another, seem to live among different 
kinds of atmosphere. Usually the resin of the 
fir predominates. But some woods are more 
coquettish in their habits; and the breath of 
the forest of Mormal, as it came aboard upon 
us that showery afternoon, was perfumed 
with nothing less delicate than sweet-brier. 

An Inland Voyage. 

NIGHT is a dead, monotonous period 
under a roof; but in the open world it 
passes lightly, with its stars and dews and 
perfumes, and the hours are marked by 
changes in the face of Nature. What seems a 
kind of temporal death to people choked be- 
tween walls and curtains is only a light and 
living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field. 
All night long he can hear Nature breathing 
deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, 
she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring 
hour unknown to those who dwell in houses. 



203 



when a wakeful influence goes abroad over ^ 
the sleeping hemisphere, and all the out-door 
world are on their feet. It is then that the 
cock crows first, not this time to announce 
the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman 
speeding the course of night. Cattle awake 
on the meadows; sheep break their fast on 
dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair 
among the ferns; and houseless men, who 
have lain down with the fowls, open their 
dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night. 
At what inaudible summons, at what gentle 
touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus 
recalled in the same hour to life ? Do the stars 
rain down an influence, or do we share some 
thrill of mother earth below our resting 
bodies \ Even shepherds and old country- 
folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana, 
have not a guess as to the means or purposes 
of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in 
the morning they declare the thing takes 
place; and neither* know nor inquire further. 
And at least it is a pleasant incident. We are 
disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxu- 
rious Montaigne, **that we may the better JJ 

204 



,and more sensibly relish it." We have a mo- 
ment to look upon the stars, and there is a 
special pleasure for some minds in the reflec- 
tion that we share the impulse with all out- 
door creatures in our neighborhood, that we 
have escaped out of the Bastile of civiliza- 
tion, and are become, for the time being, a 
mere kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's 
flock. ... A faint wind, more like a moving 
coolness than a stream of air, passed down 
the glade from time to time; so that even in 
my great chamber the air was being renewed 
all night long. I thought with horror of the 
Inn at Chasserades and the congregated 
nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prow- 
esses of clerks and students, of hot theatres 
and pass-keys and close rooms. I have not 
often enjoyed a more serene possession of 
myself, nor felt more independent of material 
aids. The outer world, from which we cower 
into our houses, seemed after all a gentle, 
habitable place; and night after night a man's 
bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him, 
in the fields, where God keeps an open house. 
I thou2;ht I had rediscovered one of those 

205 



The Ge- 
nius of 
Place 
and 
Time 



truths which are revealed to savages and hid, 
from pohtical economists: at the least, I had 
discovered a new pleasure for myself. And 
yet even while I was exulting in my solitude 
I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a 
companion to lie near me in the starlight, 
silent and not moving, but ever within touch. 
For there is a fellowship more quiet even than 
solitude, and which, rightly understood, is 
solitude made perfect. And to live out of 
doors with the woman a man loves is of all 
lives the most complete and free. 

Travels with a Donkey. 

/^NE thing in life calls for another; there 
^^ is a fitness in events and places. The 
sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind 
to sit there. One place suggests work, another 
idleness, a third early rising and long ram- 
bles in the dew. The effect of night, of any 
flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of 
day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in 
the mind an army of anonymous desires and 
pleasures. Something, we feel, should hap- 
pen; we know not Vv^hat, yet we proceed in 



206 



'quest of it. And many of the happiest hours 
in life fleet by us in this vain attendance on 
the genius of the place and moment. It is thus 
that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that 
reach into deep soundings, particularly tor- 
ture and delight me. Something must have 
happened in such places, and perhaps ages 
back, to members of my race; and when I was 
a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate 
games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, 
to fit them with the proper story. Some places 
speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry 
aloud for a murder; certain old houses de- 
mand to be haunted; certain coasts are set 
apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem 
to abide their destiny, suggestive and im- 
penetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at 
Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green 
garden and silent, eddying river — though 
it is known already as the place where Keats 
wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson 
parted from his Emma — still seems to wait 
the coming of the appropriate legend. With- 
in these ivied walls, behind these old green 
shutters, some further business smoulders. 



207 



waitino- for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at 
the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon 
my fancy. There it stands, apart from the 
town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, 
half inland, half marine — in front, the ferry 
bubbling with the tide and the guardship 
swinging to her anchor; behind, the old gar- 
den with the trees. Americans seek it already 
for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who 
dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. 
But you need not tell me — that is not all, 
there is some story, unrecorded or not yet 
complete, which must express the meaning of 
that inn more fully. So it is with names and 
faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and 
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like 
the beginning of some quaint romance, which 
the all-careless author leaves untold. How 
many of these romances have we not seen 
determine at their birth; how many people 
have met us with a look of meaning in their 
eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquain- 
tances; to how many places have we not 
drawn near, with express intimations — 
*'here my destiny awaits me" — and we have 

208 



but dined there and passed on! I have lived 
both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual 
flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some 
adventure that should justify the place; but 
though the feeling had me to bed at night 
and called me again at morning in one un- 
broken round of pleasure and suspense, noth- 
ino; befell me in either worth remark. The 
man or the hour had not yet come; but some 
day, I think, a boat shall put off from the 
Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, 
and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic 
errand, rattle with his whip upon the green 
shutters of the inn at Burford. Memories and 
Portraits. A Gossip on Romance. 

BUT indeed, it is not so much for its beauty 
that the forest makes a claim upon men's 
hearts, as for that subtle something, that qual- 
ity of the air, that emanation from the old 
trees, that so wonderfully changes and re- 
news a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick 
Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand Mon- 
archs, time out of mind have come here for 
consolation. Hither perplexed folks have re- 



2og 



tired out of the press of life, as into a deep 
bay-window on some night of masquerade, 
and here found quiet and silence, and rest, 
the mother of wisdom. It is the great moral 
spa; this forest without a fountain is itself 
the great fountain of Juventius. It is the best 
place in the world to bring an old sorrow that 
has been a long while your friend and enemy; 
and if, like Beranger's, your gaiety has run 
away from home and left open the door for 
sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it 
is here you may expect to find the truant hid. 
With every hour you change. The air pene- 
trates through your clothes, and nestles to 
your living body. You love exercise and 
slumber, long fasting and full meals. You 
forget all your scruples and live a while in 
peace and freedom, and for the moment only. 
For here, all is absent that can stimulate to 
moral feeling. Such people as you see may 
be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; but you see 
them framed in the forest, like figures on a 
painted canvas; and for you, they are not 
people in any living and kindly sense. You 
forget the grim contrariety of interests. You 



forget the narrow lane where all people jostle 
together in unchivalrous contention, and the 
kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes on 
either hand for the defeated. Life is simple 
enough, it seems, and the very idea of sacri- 
fice becomes like a mad fancy out of a last 
night's dream. Forest Notes. 



EDUCATION 



T ITERATURE, like any other art, is 
-*-^ singularly interesting to the artist; and, 
in a degree peculiar to itself among the arts, 
it is useful to mankind. These are the suffi- 
cient justifications for any young man or 
woman who adopts it as the business of his 
life. I shall not say much about the wages. A 
writer can live by his writing. If not so luxu- 
riously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. 
The nature of the work he does all day will 
more affect his happiness than the quality 
of his dinner at night. Whatever be your call- 
ing, and however much it brings you in the 
year, you could still, you know, get more by 
cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too 
much concerned about a little poverty; but 
such considerations should not move us in 
the choice of that which is to be the business 
and justification of so great a portion of our 
lives ; and like the missionary, the patriot, or 
the philosopher, we should all choose that 
poor and brave career in which we can do the 
most and best for mankind. Now nature, 
faithfully followed, proves herself a careful 
mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle 



215 



of words, betakes himself to letters for his 
life; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, 
he finds that he has chosen better than he 
knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it 
amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is 
in a position to do considerable services; that 
it is in his power, in some small measure, to 
protect the oppressed and to defend the truth. 
So kindly is the world arranged, such great 
profit may arise from a small degree of human 
reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is 
the happy star of this trade of writing, that it 
should combine pleasure and profit to both 
parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, 
and useful, like good preaching. 
This is to speak of literature at its highest; 
and with the four great elders who are still 
spared to our respect and admiration, with 
Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning and Tennyson 
before us, it would be cowardly to consider it 
at first in any lesser aspect. But while we can- 
not follow these athletes, while we may none 
of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original, 
or very wise, I still contend that, in the hum- 
blest sort of literary work, we have it in our 



2l5 



power either to do great harm or great good. 
We may seek merely to please; we may seek, 
having no higher gift, merely to gratify the 
idle nine days' curiosity of our contempo- 
raries; or we may essay, however feebly, to 
instruct. In each of these we shall have to 
deal with that remarkable art of words which, 
because it is the dialect of life, comes home 
so easily and powerfully to the minds of men; 
and since that is so, w^e contribute, in each 
of these branches, to build up the sum of sen- 
timents and appreciations which goes by the 
name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. 
The total of a nation's reading, in these days 
of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of 
the nation's speech; and the speech and read- 
ing, taken together, form the efficient educa- 
tional medium of youth. A good man or 
woman may keep a youth some little while in 
clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere 
is all-powerful in the end on the average of 
mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian 
baseness of the American reporter or the 
Parisian chroniqueur, both so lightly readable, 
must exercise an incalculable influence for 



217 



ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all 
with the same ungenerous hand; they begin 
the consideration of all, in young and unpre- 
pared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, 
they supply some pungency for dull people 
to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter 
overwhelms the rare utterances of good men; 
the sneering, selfish, and the cowardly are 
scattered in broad sheets on every table, 
while the antidote, in small volumes, lies un- 
read upon the shelf. I have spoken of the 
American and the French, not because they 
are so much baser, but so much more readable 
than the English; their evil is done more ef- 
fectively, in America for the masses, in French 
for the few that care to read; but with us as 
with them, the duties of literature are daily 
neglected, truth daily perverted and sup- 
pressed, and grave subjects daily degraded 
in the treatment. The journalist is not reck- 
oned as an important officer; yet judge of the 
good he might do, the harm he does; judge 
of it by one instance only: that when we find 
two journals on the reverse sides of politics 
each, on the same day, openly garbling a 
_ 



piece of news for the interest of its own party, 
we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) 
as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. 
Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but 
one of the things that we profess to teach our 
young is a respect for truth; and I cannot 
think this piece of education will be crowned 
with any great success, as long as some of us 
practice, and the rest openly approve of public 
falsehood. Profession of Letters. 

NOW this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the com- 
mon opinion. A fact is not called a fact, 
but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one 
of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must 
be in some acknowledged direction, with a 
name to go by; or else you are not inquiring 
at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is 
too good for you. It is supposed that all knowl- 
edge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end 
of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, 
came to regard all experience as a single great 
book, in which to study for a few years ere 
we go hence; and it seemied all one to him 
whether you should read in Chapter XX., 
f "_ 

2ig 



which is the differential calculus, or in Chap- 
ter XXXIX., which is hearing the band play 
in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intel- 
ligent person, looking out of his eyes and 
hearkening in his ears, wath a smile on his 
face all the time, will get more true education 
than many another in a life of heroic vigils. 
There is certainly some chill and arid knowl- 
edge to be found upon the summits of formal 
and laborious science; but it is all round about 
you, and for the trouble of looking, that you 
will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of 
life. While others are filling their memory 
with a lumber of words, one-half of which 
they will forget before the week be out, your 
truant may learn some really useful art: to 
play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to 
speak with ease and opportunity to all va- 
rieties of men. Many who have ** plied their 
book diligently," and know all about some 
one branch or another of accepted lore, come 
out of the study with an ancient and owl-like 
demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and 
dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts 
of life. Many make a large fortune, who re- 



main underbred and pathetically stupid to 
the last. And meantime there goes the idler, 
who began life along with them — by your 
leave, a different picture. He has had time to 
take care of his health and his spirits; he has 
been a great deal in the open air, which is the 
most salutary of all things for both body and 
mind; and if he has never read the great Book 
in very recondite places, he has dipped into it 
and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. 
Might not the student afford some Hebrew 
roots, and the business man some of his half- 
crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge 
of life, and Art of Living .? Nay, and the idler 
has another and more important quality than 
these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much 
looked on at the childish satisfaction of other 
people in their hobbies, will regard his own 
with only a very ironical indulgence. He will 
not be heard among the dogmatists. He will 
have a great and cool allowance for all sorts 
of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of- 
the-way truths, he will identify himself with 
no very burning falsehood. His way takes him 
along a by-road, not much frequented, but 



very even and pleasant, which is called Com- 
monplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere 
of Commonsense. Thence he shall command 
an agreeable,, if no very noble prospect; and 
while others behold the East and the West, 
the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be con- 
tentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon 
all sublunary things, with an army of shad- 
ows running speedily and in many different 
directions into the great daylight of Eternity. 
The shadows and the generations, the shrill 
doctors and the plangent wars, go by into 
ultimate silence and emptiness; but under- 
neath all this, a man may see, out of the Bel- 
vedere windows, much green and peaceful 
landscape; many firelit parlours; good people 
laughing, drinking, and making love as they 
did before the Flood or the French Revolu- 
tion; and the old shepherd telling his tale 
under the hawthorn. 
Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers. 



Books 
not 

Every- 
thing 



BOOKS are good enough in their own way, 
but they are a mighty bloodless substitute 
for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady 



of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your 
back turned on all the bustle and glamour of 
reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the 
old anecdote reminds us, he will have little 
time for thought. 
Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers. 

T DLENESS, so called, which does not con- 
^ sist in doing nothing, but in doing a great 
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formu- 
laries of the ruling class, has as good a right 
to state its position as industry itself. It is 
admitted that the presence of people who re- 
fuse to enter in the great handicap race for 
sixpenny pieces is at once an insult and a dis- 
enchantment for those who do. A fine fellow 
(as we see so many) takes his determination, 
votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic 
Americanism," goes for " them. And while such 
an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, 
it is not hard to understand his resentment, 
when he perceives cool persons in the meadow 
by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief 
over their ears and a glass at their elbow. 
Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers. 

223 



Educa- 
tion in 
School 
and in 
the 
Street 



Playing 
Truant 



IF you look back on your own education, I 
am sure it will not be the full, vivid, in- 
structive hours of truantry that you regret; 
you would rather cancel some lack-lustre 
periods between sleep and waking in the class. 
For my own part I have attended a good many 
lectures in my time. I still remember that the 
spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. 
I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a 
disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I 
willingly would not part with such scraps of 
science, I do not set the same store by them 
as by certain other odds and ends that I cam.e 
by in the open streets while I was playing 
truant. This is not the moment to dilate on 
that mighty place of education, which was 
the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, 
and turns out yearly many inglorious masters 
in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice 
it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the 
streets, it is because he has no faculty of 
learning. Nor is the truant always in the 
streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the 
gardened suburbs into the country. He may 
pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and 



smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the 
water on the stones. A bird will sing in the 
thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of 
kindly thought, and see things in a new per- 
spective. Why, if this be not education, what 
is ? We may conceivie Mr. Worldly Wiseman 
accosting such an one, and the conversation 
that should thereupon ensue: 
*'How now, young fellow, what dost thou 
here ?" 

*' Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 
" Is not this the hour of the class .? and shouldst 
thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, 
to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge V 
"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, 
by your leave." 

** Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I 
pray thee .r* Is it mathematics?" 
**No, to be sure." 
''Is it metaphysics V 
"Nor that." 
"Is it some language ?" 
"Nay, it is no language." 
"Is it a trade .?" 
"Nor a trade neither." 



225 



The 
Gift of 
Reading 



"Why, then, what is't?" 
"Indeed, sir, as a time may come soon for 
me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to 
note what is commonly done by persons in my 
case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and 
Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner 
of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie 
here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a 
lesson which my master teaches me to call 
Peace, or Contentment." 
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much 
commoved with passion, and shaking his cane 
with a very threatful countenance broke 
forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" 
said he; "I w^ould have all such rogues 
scourged by the Hangman! " And so he would 
go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a 
crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads 
its feathers. 
Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers. 

THE gift of reading, as I have called it, is 
not very common, nor very generally 
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast 
intellectual endowment — a free erace, I 



226 



find I must call it — by which a man rises to 
understand that he is not punctually right, 
nor those from whom he differs absolutely 
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold 
them passionately; and he may know that 
others hold them but coldly, or hold them 
differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if 
he has the gift of reading, these others will be 
full of feet for him. They will see the other 
side of propositions and the other side of vir- 
tues. He need not change his dogma for that 
but he may change his reading of that dogma, 
and he must supplement and correct his de- 
ductions from it. A human truth, which is 
always very much a lie, hides as much of life 
as it displays. It is men who hold another 
truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps a danger- 
ous He, who can extend our restricted field of 
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. 
Something that seems quite new, or that seems 
insolently false or very dangerous, is the test 
of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, 
what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let 
him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or 
exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better 

227 



Educa- 
tion of 
Boys 
and Girls 



Often 
Nothing 
but a 
System 
of 

Catch- 
words 
and 
Formu- 



take to the daily papers; he will never be a 
reader. The Infuence of Books. 

BUT it is the object of a liberal education 
not only to obscure the knowledge of one 
sex by another, but to magnify the natural 
differences between the two. Man is a crea- 
ture who lives not upon bread alone, but 
principally by catchwords; and the little rift 
between the sexes is astonishingly widened 
by simply teaching one set of catchwords to 
the girls and another to the boys. To the first 
there is shown a very small field of experience, 
and taught a very trenchant principle for 
judgment and action; to the other, the world 
of life is more largely displayed, and their 
rule of conduct is proportionally widened. 
They are taught to follow different virtues, 
to hate different vices, to place their ideal, 
even for each other, in different achievements. 
What should be the result of such a course ? 
When a horse has run away, and the two 
flustered people in the gig have each pos- 
sessed themselves of a rein, we know the end 
of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, 



when I see a raw youth and a green girl, 
fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into 
that most serious contract, and setting out 
upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously 
divergent, I am not surprised that some make 
shipwreck, but that any come to port. What 
the boy does almost proudly, as a manly 
peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debas- 
ing vice; what is to her the mere common- 
sense of tactics, he will spit out of his mouth 
as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarie- 
ties must this green couple steer their way; 
and contrive to love each other; and to re- 
spect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time 
arrives, to educate the little men and women 
who shall succeed to their places and per- 
plexities. Virginibus Puerisque. II. 

PITIFUL is the case of the blind, who can- 
not read the face; pitiful that of the deaf, 
who cannot follow the changes of the voice. 
And there are others also to be pitied; for 
there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, 
who have been denied all the symbols of 
communication, who have neither a lively 



229 



play of facial expression, nor speaking ges- 
tures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift 
of frank, explanatory speech; people truly 
made of clay, people tied for life into a bag 
which no one can undo. They are poorer than 
the gipsy, for their heart can speak no lan- 
guage under heaven. Such people vs^e must 
learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or 
through yea and nay communications; or we 
take them on trust on the strength of a gen- 
eral air, and now and again, when we see the 
spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or 
change our estimate. But these will be uphill 
intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the 
end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in 
confidence. Some minds, romantically dull, 
despise physical endowments. That is a doc- 
trine for a misanthrope; to those who like 
their fellow-creatures it must always be mean- 
ingless; and, for my part, I can see few things 
more desirable, after the possession of such 
radical qualities as honour and humour and 
pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid 
countenance; to have looks to correspond 
with every feeling; to be elegant and delight- 

230 



ful in person, so that we shall please even In 
the intervals of active pleasing, and may 
never discredit speech v^ith uncouth manners 
or become unconsciously our ov^n burlesques. 
But of all unfortunates, there is one creature 
(for I v^ill not call him man) conspicuous in 
misfortune. This is he v^ho has forfeited his 
birthright of expression, vv^ho has cultivated 
artful intonations, who has taught his face 
tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every side 
perverted or cut off his means of communica- 
tion with his fellowmen. The body is a house 
of many windows; there we all sit, shov/ing 
ourselves and crying on the passers-by to 
come and love us. But this fellow has filled 
his windows with opaque glass, elegantly col- 
oured. His house may be admired for its design, 
the crowd may pause before the stained win- 
dows, but meanwhile the door proprietor 
must lie languishing within, uncomforted, un- 
changeably alone. Virginibus Puerisque. IV. 

L'ART de bien dire is but a drawing-room 
accomplishment unless it be pressed into 
the service of the truth. The difficulty of lit- 



231 



^ 



erature is not to write, but to write what you 
mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect 
him precisely as you wish. This is commonly 
understood in the case of books or set ora- 
tions; even in making your will, or writing 
an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted 
by the world. But one thing you can never 
make Philistine natures understand; one 
thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains 
as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of 
metaphysics — namely, that the business of 
life is mainly carried on by means of this 
difficult art of literature, and according to a 
man's proficiency in that art shall be the free- 
dom and the fulness of his intercourse with 
other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say 
what he means; and, in spite of their notori- 
ous experience to the contrary, people so con- 
tinue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last 
book I have been reading — Mr. Leland's 
captivating English Gipsies. "It is said," I 
find on page 7, "that those who can converse 
with Irish peasants in their own native tongue 
form far higher opinions of their apprecia- 
tion of the beautiful, and of the elements of 



232 



humour and pathos in their hearts, than do 
those who know their thoughts only through 
the medium of English. I know from my own 
observations that this is quite the case with 
the Indians of North America, and it is un- 
questionably so with the gipsy." In short, 
where a man has not a full possession of the 
language, the most important, because the 
most amiable, qualities of his nature have to 
lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of 
comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, 
rest upon these very ''elements of humour 
and pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, 
and for lack of a medium he can put none of 
it out to interest in the market of affection! 
But what is thus made plain to our apprehen- 
sions in the case of a foreign language is par- 
tially true even with the tongue we learned 
in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different 
dialects; one shall be copious and exact, an- 
other loose and meagre; but the speech of 
the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon 
the truth of fact — not clumsily, obscuring 
lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly ad- 
» hering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the 

233 



The Art 
of the 
Orator 



result ? That the one can open himself more 
clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more of 
what makes life truly valuable — intimacy 
with those he loves. An orator makes a false 
step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, 
some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence 
he insults, by a side wind, those whom he is 
labouring to charm; in speaking to one sen- 
timent he unconsciously ruffles another in 
parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for 
you know his task to be delicate and filled 
with perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light 
ignorance!" As if yourself, when you seek 
to explain some misunderstanding or excuse 
some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and 
addressing a mind still recently incensed, 
were not harnessing for a more perilous ad- 
venture; as if yourself required less tact and 
eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspi- 
cious lover w^ere not more easy to offend than 
a meeting of indifferent politicians! Nay, and 
the orator treads in a beaten round; the mat- 
ters he discusses have been discussed a thou- 
sand times before; language is ready-shaped 
to his purpose; he speaks out of a dry and cue 



~j. 



234 



vocabulary. But you — may it not be that 
your defence reposes on some subtlety of 
feeling, not so much as touched upon in 
Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, 
you must venture forth in zones of thought 
still unsurveyed, and become yourself a liter- 
ary innovator ? For even in love there are 
unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpar- 
donable words, may yet have sprung from a 
kind sentiment. If the injured one could read 
your heart, you may be sure that he would 
understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart 
cannot be shown — it has to be demonstrated 
in words. Do you think it is a hard thing to 
write poetry ? Why, that is to write poetry, 
and of a high, if not the highest, order. 

Virginibus Puerisque. IV. 

IT is a strong thing to say what one is, and Logic 
not be ashamed of it; even although it be 
in doubtful taste to repeat the statement too 
often in one evening. I should not admire it in 
a duke, of course; but as times go, the trait is 
honourable in a workman. On the other hand, 
it is not at all a strong thing to put one's re- 



235 



liance upon logic; and our own logic particu-*^ 
larly, for it is generally wrong. We never 
know where we are to end, if once we begin 
following words or doctors. There is an up- 
right stock in a man's own heart, that is 
trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and 
the sympathies and appetites, know a thing 
or two that have never yet been stated in con- 
troversy. Reasons are as plentiful as black- 
berries; and like fisticuffs, they serve impar- 
tially with all sides. Doctrines do not stand 
or fall by their proofs, and are only logical in 
so far as they are cleverly put. An able con- 
troversialist no more than an able general 
demonstrates the justice of his cause. But 
France is all gone wandering after one or two 
big words; it will take some time before they 
can be satisfied that they are no more than 
words, however big; and when once that is 
done, they will perhaps find logic less divert- 
ing. An Inland Voyage. 



2S5 



MEN AND WOMEN 



I 



MY acquaintance with grave-diggers, con- 
sidering its length, was unremarkable. 
One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade 
in the red evening, high above Allen Water and 
in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told 
me of his acquaintance with the birds that 
still attended on his labours; how some would 
even perch about him, waiting for their prey; 
and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the 
species varied with the season of the year. 
But this was the very poetry of the profession. 
The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. 
A faint flavour of the gardener hung about 
them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. 
They had engagements to keep, not alone 
with the deliberate series of the seasons, but 
with mankind's clocks and hour-long meas- 
urement of time. And thus there was no lei- 
sure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long 
gossip, foot on spade. They were men 
wrapped up in their grim business; they 
liked well to open long-closed family vaults, 
blowing in the key and throwing wide the 
grating; and they carried in their minds a 
calendar of names and dates. It would be '*in 



239 



fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened 
for **Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke 
of their patients — familiarly but not without 
respect, like old family servants. Here is in- 
deed a servant, whom we forget that we pos- 
sess; who does not wait at the bright table, or 
run at the bell's summons, but patiently 
smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and 
in his faithful memory notches the burials of 
our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his ma- 
turity of a superficial touch savours of para- 
dox; yet he was surely in error when he at- 
tributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. 
But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge 
should lie; or perhaps the English sexton 
differs from the Scotch. The "goodman 
delver," reckoning up his years of office, 
might have at least suggested other thoughts. 
It is a pride common among sextons. A cab- 
inet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor 
even an author his volumes, save when they 
stare at him from the shelves; but the grave- 
digger numbers his graves. He would indeed 
be something different from human if his 
solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a 



240 



broad mark upon his mind. There, in his 
tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, 
among the cats and robins and the ancient 
effigies and legends of the tomb, he awaits 
the continual passage of his contemporaries, 
falling like minute drops into eternity. As 
they fall, he counts them; and this enumera- 
tion, which was at first appalling to his soul, in 
the process of years and by the kindly in- 
fluence of habit grows to be his pride and 
pleasure. There are many common stories 
telling how he piques himself on crowded 
cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old 
grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffer- 
ing bedside the minister was summoned. 
He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of 
the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane 
above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, 
the rank grasses and the upright and recum- 
bent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Mod- 
erate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very 
Roman view of deathbed dispositions; for he 
told the old man that he had lived beyond 
man's natural years, that his life had been 
easy and reputable, that his family had all 



241 



The 
Talk 
of the 
Aged 



grown up and been a credit to his care, and 
that it now behooved him unregretfuUy to gird 
his loins and follow the majority. The grave- 
digger heard him out; then he raised himself 
upon one elbow, and with the other hand 
pointed through the window to the scene of 
his life-long labours. "Doctor," he said, '*I 
ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in 
that kirkyaird; an' it had been His wull," in- 
dicating Heaven, '*I would ha'e likit weel to 
ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was 
not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had 
now another part to play; and the time had 
come when others were to gird and carry him. 
Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits. 

NOT only is the presence of the aged in 
itself remedial, but their minds are stored 
with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain con- 
siderations overlooked by youth. They have 
matter to communicate, be they never so 
stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it 
is great literature; classic in virtue of the 
speaker's detachment, studded, like a book 
of travel, with things we should not otherwise 

242 



have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the 
speaker's detachment, — and this is why, of 
two old men, the one who is not your father 
speaks to you with the more sensible author- 
ity; for in the paternal relation the oldest 
have lively interests and remain still young. 
Thus I have known two young men great 
friends; each swore by the other's father; the 
father of each swore by the other lad; and 
yet each pair of parent and child were per- 
petually by the ears. This is typical: it reads 
like the germ of some kindly comedy. 
The old appear in conversation in two char- 
acters: the critically silent and the garrulous 
anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look 
for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old 
gentleman, well on in years, sits handsomely 
and naturally in the bow-window of his age, 
scanning experience with reverted eye; and 
chirping and smiling, communicates the ac- 
cidents and reads the lesson of his long ca- 
reer. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but 
they are also weeded out in the course of 
years. What remains steadily present to the 
eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, 

243 



The 

Aged as 
Listen- 
ers 



Old 
Ladies 



what still ministers to his content, what still 
quickens his old honest heart — these are 
"the real long-lived things" that Whitman 
tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with 
age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and 
it is when the young disciple finds his heart 
to beat in tune with his gray-bearded teacher's 
that a lesson may be learned. 

Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 

THE second class of people are not anec- 
dotic; they are rather hearers than talk- 
ers, listening to the young with an amused 
and critical attention. To have this sort of 
intercourse to perfection, I think we must go 
to old ladies. Women are better listeners than 
men, to begin with: they learn, I fear in an- 
guish, to bear with the tedious and infantile 
vanity of the other sex; and we will take more 
from a woman than even from the oldest man 
in the way of biting comment. Biting com- 
ment is the chief part, whether for profit or 
amusement, in this business. The old lady 
that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, 
her tongue, after years of practice, in abso- 

244 



lute command, whether for silence or attack. 
If she chance to dislike you, you will be 
tempted to curse the malignity of age. But 
if you chance to please even slightly, you will 
be listened to with a particular laughing 
grace of sympathy, and from time to time 
chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as 
heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, 
as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal 
these stunning corrections among the cox- 
combs of the young. The pill is disguised in 
sugar of wit; it is administered as a compli- 
ment — if you had not pleased, you would 
not have been censured; it is a personal affair 
— a hyphen, a trait d'union, between you 
and your censor; age's philandering, for her 
pleasure and your good. Incontestably the 
young man feels very much of a fool; but he 
must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self- 
love, if he cannot take an open buffet and 
still smile. The correction of silence is what 
kills; when you know you have transgressed, 
and your friend says nothing and avoids your 
eye. If a man were made of gutta-percha, his 
heart would quail at such a moment. But 
_ 



Women 
as Talk- 
ers and 
Listen- 
ers 



when the word is out, the worst is over; and a 
fellow with any good-humour at all may pass 
through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every 
bare place on his soul hit to the quick with 
a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a 
dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and 
ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third 
loath, for a repetition of the discipline. 

Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 

THERE are few women, not well sunned 
and ripened, and perhaps toughened, 
who can thus stand apart from a man and 
say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. 
Still there are some — and I doubt if there be 
any man who can return the compliment. 
The class of man represented by Vernon 
Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the 
true thing, but he says it stockishly, Vernon 
is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a 
noble and instructive contrast to Daniel 
Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man 
of honour; but we agree with him, against 
our consciences, when he remorsefully con- 
siders "its astonishing dryness." He is the 

246 



best of men, but the best of women manage 
to combine all that and something more. 
Their very faults assist them; they are helped 
even by the falseness of their position in life. 
They can retire into the fortified camp of the 
proprieties. They can touch a subject and 
suppress it. The most adroit employ a some- 
what elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, 
much as they wear gloves when they shake 
hands. But a man has the full responsibility 
of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can 
scarce be silent without rudeness, must an- 
swer for his words upon the moment, and is 
not seldom left face to face with a damning 
choice, between the more or less dishonour- 
able wriggling of Deronda and the down- 
right woodenness of Vernon Whitford. 
But the superiority of women is perpetually 
menaced; they do not sit throned on infirm- 
ities like the old; they are suitors as well as 
sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their af- 
fections are too apt to follow; and hence much 
of the talk between the sexes degenerates into 
something unworthy of the name. The desire 
to please, to shine with a certain softness of 



247 



lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of 
oneself, banishes from conversation all that 
is sterling and most of what is humorous. 
As soon as a strong current of mutual ad- 
miration begins to flow, the human interest 
triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and 
the commerce of words, consciously or not, 
becomes secondary to the commercing of 
eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger 
is avoided, and a man and woman converse 
equally and honestly, something in their 
nature or their education falsifies the strain. 
An instinct prompts them to agree; and 
where that is impossible, to agree to differ. 
Should they neglect the warning, at the first 
suspicion of an argument, they find them- 
selves in different hemispheres. About any 
point of business or conduct, any actual af- 
fair demanding settlement, a woman will 
speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, 
not only with natural wisdom, but with can- 
dour and logical honesty. But if the subject 
of debate be something in the air, an abstrac- 
tion^ an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, 
then may the male debater instantly abandon 

248 



hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, 
be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail 
him nothing; what the woman said first, that 
(unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat 
at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when 
a talk between men grows brighter and 
quicker and begins to promise to bear fruit, 
talk between the sexes is menaced with disso- 
lution. The point of difference, the point of 
interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman, 
under a shower of irrelevant conversational 
rockets; it is bridged by the discreet woman 
with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly 
forward to the nearest point of safety. And 
this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dan- 
gerous topic out of sight until it can be rein- 
troduced with safety in an altered shape, is a 
piece of tactics among the true drawing-room 
queens. 
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 

NOTHING could be more characteristic 
of the two countries. Politics are the re- 
ligion of France; as Nanty Ewart would have 
said, "A d d bad religion"; while we, at 

249 



Wom- 
an's 
Value 
as a 

Teacher 
appears 
most in 
Married 
Life 



home, keep most of our bitterness for little 
differences about a hymn-book, or a Hebrew 
word which, perhaps, neither of the parties 
can translate. And perhaps the misconcep- 
tion is typical of many others that may never 
be cleared up; not only between people of 
different race, but between those of different 
sex. An Inland Voyage. 

THE drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial 
place; it is so by our choice and for our 
sins. The subjection of women; the ideal im- 
posed upon them from the cradle, and worn, 
like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their 
motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity 
and self-importance; their managing arts — 
the arts of a civilized slave among good- 
natured barbarians — are all painful ingre- 
dients and all help to falsify relations. It is 
not till we get clear of that amusing artificial 
scene that genuine relations are founded, or 
ideas honestly compared. In the garden, on 
the road, or the hillside, or tete-a-tete and 
apart from interruptions, occasions arise when 
we may learn much from any single woman; 

250 



and nowhere more often than in married 
life. Marriage is one long conversation, 
checquered by disputes. The disputes are 
valueless: they but ingrain the difference; the 
heroic heart of woman prompting her at once 
to nail her colours to the mast. But in the in- 
tervals, almost unconsciously and with no 
desire to shine, the whole material of life is 
turned over and over, ideas are struck out 
and shared, the two persons more and more 
adapt their notions one to suit the other, and 
in process of time, without sound of trumpet, 
they conduct each other into new worlds of 
thought. 

Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 

NOW, what I like so much in France is 
the clear, unflinching recognition by 
everybody of his own luck. They all know on 
which side their bread is buttered, and take a 
pleasure in showing it to others, which is 
surely the better part of religion. And they 
scorn to make a poor mouth over their pov- 
erty, which I take to be the better part of 
manliness. I have heard a woman in quite a 

251 



better position at home, with a good bit of 
money in hand, refer to her own child with a 
horrid whine as "a poor man's child." I 
would not say such a thing to the Duke of 
Westminster. And the French are full of this 
spirit of independence. Perhaps it is the re- 
sult of republican institutions, as they call 
them. Much more likely it is because there 
are so few people really poor, that the whiners 
are not enough to keep each other in coun- 



tenance. 



An Inland Foya^ 



The 

Aged as 
Teachers 



THE best teachers are the aged. To the 
old our mouths are always partly closed; 
we must swallow our obvious retorts and 
listen. They sit above our heads, on life's 
raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect 
and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch 
of something different in their manner — 
which is freer and rounder, if they come of 
what is called a good family, and often more 
timid and precise if they are of the middle 
class — serves, in these days, to accentuate 
the difference of age and add a distinction to 
gray hairs. But their superiority is founded 



252 



more deeply than by outward marks or ges- 
tures. They are before us in the march of man; 
they have more or less solved the irking prob- 
lem; they have battled through the equinox of 
life; in good and evil they have held their 
course; and now^, w^ithout open shame, they 
near the crown and harbour. It may be we 
have been struck with one of fortune's darts; 
we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit 
tossed. Yet long before we were so much as 
thought upon, the like calamity befell the old 
man or woman that now, with pleasant hu- 
mour, rallies us upon our inattention, sitting 
composed in the holy evening of man's life, 
in the clear shining after rain. We grow 
ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and 
coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; we 
see life in aerial perspective, under the heav- 
ens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere 
presence of contented elders, look forward 
and take patience. Fear shrinks before them 
"like a thing reproved," not the flitting and 
ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, 
dwelling terror of the responsibilities and re- 
venges of hfe. Their speech, indeed, is timid; 



they report lions in the path; they counsel a 
meticulous footing; but their serene, marred 
faces are more eloquent and tell another 
story. Where they have gone, we will go also, 
not very greatly fearing; what they have en- 
dured unbroken, we also, God helping, will 
make a shift to bear. 

Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers. 



English 
man's 
Pride 
and Ig- 
norance 



IN spite of these promptings to reflection, 
ignorance of his neighbours is the character 
of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering 
nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, 
but neither curious nor quick about the life 
of others. In French colonies and still more 
in the Dutch, I have read that there is an 
immediate and lively contact between the 
dominant and the dominated race, that a 
certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least 
a transfusion of prejudices, making life 
easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, 
bursting with pride and ignorance. He figures 
among his vassals in the hour of peace with 
the same disdainful air that led him on to 
victory. A passing enthusiasm for some for- 



254 



eign art or fashion may deceive the world, it 
cannot impose upon his intimates. He may 
be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, 
but he will never condescend to study him 
with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress 
with whom I profess myself in love, declares 
all the viands of Japan to be uneatable — a 
staggering pretension. So, when the Prince 
of Wales's marriage was celebrated at Men- 
tone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was 
proposed to give them solid English fare — 
roast beef and plum pudding, and no tom- 
foolery. Here we have either pole of the 
Britannic folly. We will not eat the food of 
any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, 
will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The 
same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American 
missionaries, who had come thousands of miles 
to change the faith of Japan, and openly pro- 
fessed their ignorance of the religions they 
were trying to supplant. . . . The egoism of 
the Englishman is self-contained. He does not 
seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in 
Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the un- 
kindest cut of all, he does not care to justify 

255 



his indifFerence. Give him the wages of going 
on and being an Englishman, that is all he 
asks; and in the meantime, while you con- 
tinue to associate, he would rather not be re- 
minded of your baser origin. Compared with 
the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his de- 
meanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot 
seem uneasy, vulgar and immodest. That you 
should continually try to establish human 
and serious relations, that you should actually 
feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and 
invite a return of interest, may argue some- 
thing more awake and lively in your mind, 
but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor 
and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest 
class of the educated English towers over a 
Scotchman by the head and shoulders. 
Memories and Portraits. The Foreigner at 
Home. 



256 



. Index 

Actor, the, as Artist, 163, 164 
Adam, the Old, 136, 137 
Advice to the Young Writer, 183-185 
Age, Old, Invalidism is Premature, 69-72 
Aged, the, as Listeners, 244-246 
the Talk of, 242-244 
as Teachers, 252-254 
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 180 
Art, Choice of Words in Writing, 167-169 

the Duties of the Writer as Story-teller, 
194-198 

of the Orator, 234, 235 

Selection in, 165 

of Speaking Well, 231, 234 

Style in, 165 

of Words, the Dialect of Life, 217 
Artist, the Actor as, 163, 164 
Aspiration, 123-125 
Aurelius, Marcus, 180 

B 

Bivouacs, the Halts of Life, 104-106 

Blind Bow-boy, the, 57-58 

Books, are Letters to the Author's Friends, 190 

257 



Books not Everything, 222, 223 
Bow-boy, the BHnd, 57, 58 
Boyhood, Our, 54 
Boys, Education of, 228 
Business, Honesty in, 16 

and Pleasure, 33 
Busyness, a Sign of Lack of Generosity, 17 

a Symptom of Deficient Vitality, 
16-19 

C 
Cathedrals, 166 
Character, Good Traits in, 145 
Child, and the Mother, must Part, 93, 94 
Children, Realism in, 65-67 
Child's Play, "Making BeHeve" in, 60-65 
Convalescence, the Pleasures of, 75-77 
Courage, Brave Deeds Breed their Kind, 

31-33 

Fears not Death, 21, 22, 27, 28 
in Life, 95 
Courtship, the Prologue to the Love-story 

of Marriage, 80 
Creed, Change of, 149, 150 



258 



D 


Index 


Dangers, to Reckon, too Curiously, 155, 156 




D'Artagnan, Dumas's, 19Q-192 




Death, 13, 14 




Attempt the Leap though it Catch 




you in Mid-air, 27, 28 




and Disease, i 




how to Think of, 33, 34 




the Fear of, cowardly, 20, 21 




the Last Thing a Brave Man Thinks 




of, 21, 22 




Nature's Way in, 155 




our Healthy Indifference to, 19-21 




Rest after, 96 




the Young Man and, 28-30 




Deceit, 5, 6 




Deeds, Great, Breed their Kind, 31-33 




Modesty in, 143 




Despair, the Poetry of, 181, 182 




Disease and Death, i 




Doctrines, 236 




Dogs, Affected by Society's Laws, 119-121 




Dream, Romance the Realization of the Ideal 




Laws of the Day Dream, 185-187 





259 



Index 



Dreams, by the Fireside, 56 
Dumas, A., his D'Artagnan, 190-192 



Education, of Boys and Girls, 228 

often Nothing but a System of 
Catchwords and Formulae, 228, 

229 
in School and in the Street, 
224-226 
"Egoist, The," Meredith's, 174, 175 
Endurance, Human, 143, 144 
England, and France, 249, 250 

the Englishman's Pride and Igno- 
rance, 254-256 
Englishman, his Pride and Ignorance, 254-256 
Esteem, Be not too Wise in your Own, 139 
Evolution, our Dissatisfaction with the Theory 
of, 156, 157 

F 
Failure, Success out of, 129-134 
Faith, 38, 39 

in Marriage, 38 
Fame, 30, 31 
Fireside, the Dreams by, 56 

260 



Fool, it Requires Brains to Make a, of 

Yourself, 138 
Forest, the, as Comforter, 209-211 

and Ocean, 202, 203 
Forests, and Woods, 201, 202 
France, and England, 249, 250 

French Independence, 251,252 
French, Independence, 251, 252 
Friend, a, is he who Knows you are No Good, 

and is Willing to Forget It, 37 
Friends, Truth of Intercourse between, 3 
Friendships, Instability of, 34, 35 

the Power and Ground of 

the Power and Ground of, a 

Mystery, 129 
the Tender Link between Us and 
Life, 14-16 



Generosity, the Death of, in the Prudent, 24 
Genius, the, of Place and Time, 206-209 
Girls, Education of, 228 

Godwin, Hannah, her Requirements for a 
Good Wife, 43 



261 



Index Gratitude, 146 

Grave-diggers, 239-242 

H 

Happiness, Dwelling with, lOi 

to be Found in Social Life, 56, 57 
Health, Better to Lose it like a Spendthrift 

than Waste it like a Miser, 26, 27 
Heroism, Dr. Samuel Johnson's, 25, 26 
*'High Passion," the, not often the Cause of 

Marriage, 42 
Home, Letters from, 55, 56 
Honesty, in Business, 16 
Hope, 38, 39 

in Marriage, 38 

Ever Walk in, though there be no Goal 
to Reach, 79, 80 
Human Endurance, 143, 144 
Hurry, 141 

I 
Idleness, 223 

Apology for, 67-69 

the Wisest are most Successful in, 

Idlet, the Wisdom of the, 221, 222 
262 



Ignorance, Better than the Knowledge which " ** 
Brings Sadness, 182, 183 

Imprudence, in Life, 2 

Independence, French, 251, 252 

Indiscretion, the, of Youth, 137, 138 

IndividuaHty, 144, 145 

Intercourse, Truth of, 2, 3 

between Friends, 3 
between Parent and Child, 3 
between Lovers, 3, 4 
between Man and Wife, 4, 5 

Invalid, the, and his Joys, 72-75 

Invalidism, Premature Old Age, 69-72 

J 

Jealousy, 142 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, his Heroism, 25, 26 

K 

Knowledge, 219-221 

Ignorance Better than the, which 
Brings Sadness, 182, 183 
Kindness, is Love's Essence, 10-12 

L 

"Leaves of Grass," Whitman's, 173, 174 
Letter, from Home, 55, 56 

263 



Index 



Letters, Books are, to the Author's Friends, 

190 
Liberty, the Price of Money is, 58, 59 
Lies and Lying, 81-83 
Life, Bivouacs the Halts of, 104-106 
Courage in, 95 

Friendship our Tender Link with, 14-16 
Independence in, 2 
its Highest Pleasures Brought by Love, 

8,9 
Live To-day the Day's, i, 2 
Love of, 23 

Our Divine Unrest, 158, 159 
the Place of Money in, no, in 
the Price we Pay for what we Want in 

Life, 58, 59 
Social, Happiness to be Found in, 56,57 
Success in, not Busyness, 18 
the True Lover of, 24-26 
Listeners, the Aged as, 244-246 

Women as, 246 
Literature, the Choice of, as a Profession, 
215-219 
the Duties of the Writer as Story- 
teller, 194-198 

264 



Literature, the Truth in, is Essential, 192-194 
Logic, 235, 236 

Love, Brings v/ith it the Highest Sense of the 
Pleasure of Living, 8, 9 
Declaration of, 35, 36 
the Essence of, is Kindness, 10-12 
Falling in, 6-8 
the Ideal Proposal is not Expressed in 

Words, 36, 37 
is not Blind, 37 
the Lion of, hardly a fit Animal for the 

Domestic Pet, 44 
not often the Cause of Marriage, 41, 42 
the True Love Story Begins with Mar- 
riage, 80 
Lover, the, your Best Advocate, 5 

the Happy, is the Condescending 
Gentleman, 9, 10 
Lovers, Truth of Intercourse between, 3, 4 
Lying and Lies, 81-83 
Lying, Silence a Method of, 82 

M 
"Making Believe," in Child's Play, 60-65 
Man, his Dependence, 117, 118 

265 



Index 



Man, the Self-made, 146 

and Wife, Truth of Intercourse be- 
tween, 4, 5 
Men, Great, Lack of Prudence in, 139-141 
Marriage, its Advantages, 45 

its Beneficent Effects, 49 
Choice in, 40, 41 
its Commonplaceness, 49, 50 
Courtship is the Prologue to the 

Love Story of, 80 
Enlarging to Women, 50 
its Experience Chastening, 51 
Hannah Godwin's Acquirements 

for,43 
the Lion of Love, hardly a fit ani- 
mal for the Domestic Pet, 44 
Marry in Faith and not in Plope, 38 
the Modern Idyll of, often Writ in 

Common Prose, 42, 43 
not for Love, 41 
our Presumption in Marrying, 

to Refrain from, is Cowardice, 38 
its Speculative Nature, 46, 47 
Successful and Unsuccessful, 41 



266 



Marriage, the True Love Story Begins with, 80 

A Wife is the Witness of your Life 

and the Sharpest Critic of your 

Conduct and Character, 52, 53 

A Wife is the Domestic Recording 

Angel, 53 
Women's Value as Teachers best 
Shown in, 250, 251 
Men, Representative, and their Works, 118, 

119 
Meredith, George, "The Egoist," 174, 175 
Mind, Tranquillity of, 145 
Modesty, in Deeds, 143 
Money, the Place of, in Life, no, in 

the Price of, we Pay in Liberty, 

58, 59 
Morality and Poverty, 54, 55 
Mother, the, and the Child, must Part, 93, 94 

N 

Nature, the God of, 156 

the Invalid's Pleasure in, 73 
Night, Sleep in the Open Air at, 203-206 
"No" and "Yes," Saying, 146 

267 



Index 



o 

Occupation, General, 35 
Ocean, and Forest, 202, 203 
Old Adam, the, 136, 137 
Old Age, and Youth, i 

Invalidism is Premature, 69-72 
Old People, Talk of, 243 

as Teachers, 252-254 
Opinion, All, Stages on the Road to Truth, 
112, 113 
is the Tavern by the Way, in which 
we Dwell a little while on our Way 
to Truth, 1 1 4-1 16 
Public, 217 
Opportunities, Satisfy Those you Have before 

Looking for New Opportunities, 59, 60 
Orator, the Art of the, 234, 235 
Over-wise, to be, is to Ossify, 23, 24 



Pan, the Greek Idea of, 152 

Pan's Pipes, 150-158 

Parent and Child, Truth of Intercourse be- 

^ tween, 3 
Pipes, Pan's, 150-158 
_ 



Place, the Genius of, and Time, 206-209 index 

Play, Child's, ''MaJcing Believe" in, 60-65 

Play, the, 176-178 

Plays and Romances, 176-180 

Pleasure and Business, 33 

Pleasures, the Sense of the Highest, Brought 

by Love, 8, 9 
Poetry, the, of Despair, 181, 182 
Poverty and Morality, 54, 55 
Prayer, 159 
Prudence, Death to Generosity, 24 

Lack of, in Great Men, 139-141 
Profession, a, the Choice of Literature as, 

215-219 
Proposal of Love, the Ideal, is not Expressed 

in Words, 36, 37 

Q 

Questions, Putting, 112 

R 
Railway Travel, 77-79 
Reading, the Gift of, 226, 227 
Realism, in Children, 65-67 
Reporting, 217, 218 

269 



Index Representative Men and their Works, 1 18, 1 1I9 

Respectability, 53 
Rest, after Death, 96 

after a Tramp, 99-101 ' 

River, a, 201 
Romance, the, 178-180 

the Quality of, 1 88-190 
the Realization of the Ideal Laws 
of the Day Dream, 185-187 
Romances and Plays, 176-180 



Sabbath, the, 149 

Sadness, Ignorance Better than that Knowl- 
edge which Brings, 182, 183 
School, Education in, 224 
Science, its Characteristics, 157 
Selection in Art, 165 
Selfishness, the, of Youth, 134-136 
Self-made Man, the, 146 
Silence, a Method of Lying, 82 

in Speech, 94, 95 
Sleep, in the Open Air at Night, 203-206 
Soldier, the, and the Thief, iii, 112 
Society, Laws of. Affect even Dogs, 119-121 



270 



Speech, the Art of Speaking Well, 231-234 ^^'^^ 

the Gift of, 229-231 
Silence in, 94, 95 
Street, the. Education in, 224 
Style, 164, 165 

Success, out of Failure, 129-134 
Sweethearts, 10 

T 
Talk, 84-92 

Art of, 90, 91 

the Art of Speaking Well, 231-234 

the, of the Aged, 242-244 

the Instrument of Friendship, 85 

its Methods, 88, 89 

Natural, a Festival of Ostentation, 
86, 87 

its Qualities, 84 
Talker, a Good, is like a Good Angler, 85, 86 
Talkers, Women as, 246 
Teacher, Woman's Value as a, 250 
Teachers, the Aged as, 252-254 
Thief, the, and the Soldier, iii, 112 
Time, the Genius of Place and, 206-209 

the Value of, 95 
Tour, a Walking, 106-110 



371 



Index 



Traits, Good, in Character, 145 
Tramp, Rest after a, 99-101 
Tranquillity, of Mind, 145 
Travel, 98 

Railway, 77-79 
Travellers, we are all, 99 
Travels, Pleasure Trips in the Land of 
Thought and among the Hills of Vanity, 
101-104 
Trips, Pleasure, in the Land of Thought 
and among the Hills of Vanity, 101-104 
Truant, Playing, 224 

Truth, the, in Literature is Essential, 192-194 

Opinion is the Tavern by the Way in 

which we Dwell a Little While on 

our Way to, 114-116 

All Opinion Stages on the Road to, 

112,113 
Telling the, 96-98 

the True Veracity is in the Spirit and 
not in the Letter of Truth, 83 



U 



Unrest, our Divine, 158, 159 



272 



Value, we Value what we Pay for, 57 
Veracity, the True, is in the Spirit and not in 
the Letter of Truth, 83 

W 
Walking, a Tour, 106-110 
Whitman, Walt, "Leaves of Grass," 173, 174 
Wife, the, 39, 40 

a, is but a Woman; a Being of Like 

Frailties as is the Man, 121-123 
is the Witness of your Life and the 
Sharpest Critic of your Conduct, 

52> 53- 
is the Domestic Recording Angel, 53 
Man and. Truth of Intercourse be- 
tween, 4, 5 
Wise, Be not too, in your own Esteem, 139 
Woman, her Self-sufficiency, 116 

her Value as Teacher best Shown 
in Marriage, 250, 251 
Women, as Talkers and Listeners, 246-249 
Woods, and Forests, 201, 202 
Words, Art of, the Dialect of Life, 217 
Choice of, in Writing, 167-169 

273 



Index Wordsworth, 175 

World, the, our Experience of, 151 
Writer, a, the Choice of Literature as a Pro- 
fession, 215-219 
the, the Duties of, as Story-teller,, 

194-198 
the Young, Advice to the, 183-185 
Writing, Choice of Words in, 167-169 

Y 

"Yes" and "No," Saying, 146 
Youth and Death, 28-30 
Youth, Indiscretions of, 137, 138 
and Old Age, i 
Preserve the Quality of, 2 
the Selfishness of, 134-136 



4102 



274 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proc 
O Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
. ' Treatment Date: May 2009 

PreservationTechnologi 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVE 



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